


Never Have I Ever

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fooled Around and Fell in Love, Friends With Benefits, Smut, Underage Drinking, all those good things, poor communication skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:13:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 58,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6114724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caitlin Snow is an awkward, grouchy, too-serious, too-studious virgin. She'd like to take care of at least one of those problems. (Maybe then the others will fix themselves.)</p><p>When the girl across the hall asks Cisco Ramon for a favor, he agrees. She's a little weird, sure, but she's also hot and funny and smart, and really, what's the downside here?</p><p>They forgot to take one thing into account: neither of them have a clue how to do friends with benefits properly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. . . . Had a Broken Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is my long-talked-about friends-with-benefits college AU. I hope to be able to post it a couple of times a week.

_New Year's Day_

"Happy New Year!"

Felicity expected a rousing, "fuck you," from Caitlin. She had been drinking a lot the night before. Sophomore year had apparently loosened up her rather prim sister.

But all she got was a broken whimper from the blanket-swathed lump in the bed.

"Caitlin?" she asked, wondering if she should set up a trash can for her to barf into. "Honey? How are you feeling?"

Sob.

Okay. That wasn't a hungover sob, that was an everything-is-wrong-and-I-need-my-big-sister-to-fix-it sob. Felicity peeled back the blanket and crawled in next to her, wrapping her arms around her sister's shoulders. "Caitie-Cait, you said you were okay, you were handling - "

"I am."

"You're hungover and sobbing, that doesn't sound like handling it." It must be really hitting her. Even five years ago, when she'd been fourteen and Felicity had been sixteen and the scandal had first broken, Caitlin hardly ever cried even in front of her. 

Felicity petted her sister's hair. "Look, you and me, we'll get through this. Like we always have." It wouldn't be easy, she thought. They'd already gotten a call from a reporter. But she and Caitlin weren't shell-shocked teenagers anymore, and they were more than their mother's daughters.

"I know," Caitlin said, voice muffled by the pillow. "I know we will. That's not why I'm crying."

"It's not?" Felicity couldn't help but feel relieved, if confused. "Then, okay. What's all this about?"

Caitlin pressed her face into her pillow and wailed, " _He texted me._ "

"Wait, Dad - ?"

"No! It doesn't have anything to do with Dad."

"Is the guy who's been texting you all break?" She'd been watching her sister lunge for her phone every time it buzzed for the past two weeks. And it had been buzzing a lot. "What's his name? Ronnie? What did he say, honey?"

"No," she hiccuped. "Not him. The one who hasn't."

"Ohhhhh," Felicity said slowly.

This explained why Caitlin was spending so much time curled up in her window seat, face pressed against the glass. Also every time Caitlin looked at her phone, there was a flicker of disappointment in her eyes before she texted back. Felicity had read the texts from Ronnie, which were flirty and attentive and pretty much everything you could ask for from a guy you'd been crushing on, which Caitlin had since she'd met him as a freshman.

But now there was someone else. Someone Caitlin was far more into than she was into Ronnie, no matter how flirty and attentive his texts were. Someone who hadn't sent anything until now.

She stroked her sister's hair. "What did this other guy say?"

"H-happy New Y-year."

Felicity winced. "Is that it? Well, it's . . . it's something, right?"

"It was a mass text. I checked. He sent it to everybody in his contacts."

"Oh, honey," she said, pulling her close. "Who is this guy?"

"He lives in my dorm," Caitlin hiccuped. "Across the hall. He's an engineering major, and he has so many friends and now some of them are actually _my_ friends. He helped me study and whenever he sees me, he smiles! At me! And he's _kind_ and he figured out how to put Professor Wells' car on the roof and he always remembers I hate olives and he taught me how to make fifteen different kinds of mixed drinks so I could figure out which ones I liked and _I miss him_."

"He sounds . . ." Actually he sounded pretty great. Except how great could he be if the only contact from him all break had been a mass text? "Um, so far I'm not really . . . "

"I messed up. I messed up so bad. We had the most awful fight and Felicity, I think I'm in love with him. And that wasn't the deal, that's not what it was supposed to be."

"What was it supposed to be?"

Caitlin's back heaved. "He was j-just giving me sex lessons!"

Felicity's hand paused in her hair. "Wait. He what?"


	2. . . . Mixed a Cocktail

_October_

When Caitlin walked into the kitchen, the music immediately dropped in volume, and she let out a sigh of relief. She didn't go to parties, generally. She knew her presence at this one had been a pity invite. Sarah hadn't actually expected her to come.

But she'd heard that Ronnie Raymond would be there, so she'd said, "Yes, all right. What's your address?"

He was here, but she'd barely managed to mumble a hello that he probably hadn't even heard. If she got some alcohol in her system, she might shed enough of her inhibitions to actually say, "great party," or "how's it going" or "you're extremely pretty and I would like you to put your lips on my lips" or other things that normal, non-freak girls said to the guys that made their knees wobble and their stomach all squishy.

She stood studying the selection of bottles on the counter, frowning to herself. There was a keg on the patio, she knew, but this was where the harder liquor resided, and she had the feeling that she needed something far harder than beer.

Someone yelled, "Be right back, I'm getting the drinks!"

She spun, and the guy who'd just walked into her sanctuary paused. It was her neighbor from the dorm. She'd seen him off and on for the past month, but she'd been too embarrassed to ask his name, after the way they'd first met.

He didn't seem to be suffering any embarrassment whatsoever. Of course, he was the kind of guy who didn't. He gave her a bright smile and tucked his long hair behind his ears. "Hey, I know you. Thawne House, right? You're Across-the-Hall-Studying-Girl."

She blushed. "Yes. That's me."

"Are our headphones working? Sorry, we're kind of addicted to that game right now and we don't always know how loud we are."

The video-game noise shut off around ten now. Except for the occasional yell of triumph or howl of rage, it was mostly quiet. She wondered how late he and his roommate played. "Yes, they're fine. Thank you."

"Awesome. Good to know. Sorry about that again. We didn't think anybody would be doing heavy-duty studying the second week of the semester."

"You clearly don't have Professor Wells."

"Clearly." He set out several shot glasses in a row and studied the bottles. "I lost Rock Paper Lizard Scissors Spock, so I had to come get the shots. What's your poison, Across-the-Hall-Studying-Girl?"

"Caitlin for short," she said.

He laughed. "Okay. Caitlin for short. I'm Cisco Ramon, in case you wanted to call me something besides Loud-Asshole-Who-Keeps-Me-From-Academic-Domination. Can I make you something?"

She shrugged and plucked a red Solo cup off the upside-down stack. "I'll just go fill this from the keg."

"Beer? Is your drink?" He'd selected his vodka and was pouring it in efficient splashes down the row of glasses.

"What's wrong with beer?"

"Nothing, if it's any good. It's just not what I woulda pictured for you, is all."

She thought of being sarcastic - _In the two whole minutes of non-yelling conversation we've had so far?_ \- or self-righteous - _I can drink whatever I want without your input, thank you very much_ \- or even making up some fake connoisseurship - _I love beer, it's all I drink._

But there was something so laid back about him that she found herself admitting, "I don't really have any strong preference. When it comes to alcohol."

He started arranging the shots on a plate. "So you just drink whatever people hand you?"

"Of course not. I always make my own. I'm well-versed in the effects of date-rape drugs."

His hands froze and his smile faded. "By well-versed, do you mean - "

"Oh! No. Not personal experience. I just read all the reports and I know what to watch out for, but I also know that by the time you really feel the effects, your decision making capabilities are severely compromised. So in the long run, I decided on a policy of always making my own drinks." She trailed off, feeling like she'd just given a lecture in class, for which the professor would smile at her and the other kids would roll their eyes.

He nodded and reached out for another shot glass. "Ah. Gotcha. Good policy. And how many drinks do you know how to mix?"

"I -" She cleared her throat. "I don't exactly have what you might call a repertoire."

"So you drink beer. That you don't really like."

"It's all right."

He shook his head. "Look. Life's too short to settle for shitty beer." He rolled his eyes at the patio and the keg. "And trust me, that's some shitty beer."

She gave him a cool, cool look. "What do you suggest I drink instead? Vodka?"

"You're not a vodka straight up kind of person, no."

"What kind of person am I?"

He poked around in the bottles. "Mmmm. You strike me as a Lemon Drop type."

"What's in that?"

"Lemon juice - " He put a bottle down. "Vodka." Another bottle. "And sugar." He opened up a cabinet, utterly shameless, and produced a pink-and-white box of sugar cubes. "You can also use Triple Sec but I don't see any." He grinned at her. "What do you think?"

"About?"

"Starting up your repertoire. Learning how to make a Lemon Drop."

She frowned at the ingredients. She did like lemon flavor candy. "Right now?"

He shrugged. "Why wait? That beer's not getting any less shitty."

"Don't you need a wispy little beard to be that much of a hipster?"

He laughed, which was not the reaction that her snotty comments usually got. "The last time I grew a wispy little beard, I was in the fifth grade. For me, it's lumberjack or nothing. Hey, are you going to try this out or what?"

Her sister always said she needed to try things out. _Just to see, Caitie-Cait. Even if you hate it, at least you know._

She shrugged. "I suppose I might as well."

"Oh, wow, knock me down with your enthusiasm." He tilted his head and grinned at her. "C'mon, I need a clear, unequivocal expression of consent here."

She rolled her eyes. They'd all sat through an hour-long presentation just last night about sexual consent, and their RA had said that about five or six times. But it made her smile, too. She said archly, "Cisco Ramon, will you teach me how to make a Lemon Drop?"

Imitating her tone of voice, he said, "I would be happy to, Caitlin - ?" He raised his brows at her.

"S-snow," she said. "It's Caitlin Snow."

"Caitlin Snow," he repeated. "I would be delighted, in fact."

She laughed and his grin widened.

"Okay," he said, rubbing his hands together. "We should have a cocktail shaker but this is not exactly a cocktail shaker kind of establishment here, so - " He poked around in the dish rack and found a travel cup with a screw-on lid. He gave it a sniff, nodded, and handed it over. "Right in there. We're starting with some ice cubes and some sugar."

"How many?"

"Doesn't matter the ice, really. For the sugar cubes - how are you on sweet things?"

She shrugged.

"Okay, one."

"Why not in my cup?" she asked, selecting ice cubes from the bag he held out.

"Because we've got to shake it."

She added the sugar cube. "Not stir it?"

"No, Jamesina Bond, we're not gonna stir it." He grinned at her. Not mockingly, just amused. He handed her the vodka bottle. "Two ounces of this."

She opened her mouth, and he produced a measuring cup.

"How did you know what I wanted?"

"Wild guess," he said dryly.

She squinted at the numbers, poured precisely two ounces of vodka, and looked up.

He grinned at her again. "Now measure up some of that lemon juice. One ounce. And then twist the top on and shake it."

"How long?"

"Mmmm - count to thirty."

She did as instructed, counting silently. She suspected her boobs were bouncing, and when she looked up, his eyes were fixed very hard just over her shoulder. Which was nice of him.

"Now?"

"Should be done."

She started to unscrew the top, and he reached over and flicked the little slider, exposing the small sipping hole. "Pour."

She did, admiring the way it strained out the ice as she filled her Solo cup. He was very clever. The drink looked like lemonade. She tasted it carefully and screwed up her face.

"Uh-oh," he said. "Too strong?"

"A little strong. But more like too tart."

"Want another sugar cube?"

She took another sip. "No, I'm getting used to it."

"Well?"

She slid her eyes his way. "It's better than the beer."

"It's way better than the beer."

"It's somewhat better than the beer," she said primly, although she had already filed away the recipe for future reference. "How did you learn how to do this?"

"I have this cousin who's a bartender. Before I came to college, she taught me all these. She said any frat douche can pour a beer, but people always remember the guy who mixed them a great drink."

She took a third sip. It was a good drink, she decided. Maybe great. She didn't know yet. "Was she right?"

"Hey, I don't kiss and tell."

She blushed and started to neaten up, running water in the measuring cup and the travel mug. He put the cap back on the vodka and the lemon juice.

When she stretched up to put away the sugar cubes in their cupboard, she turned her head and caught him looking at her legs, in the short skirt. He looked up and met her eyes, smiled a little, and looked away. "Anyway," he said, picking up the plate of vodka shots. "Enjoy."

She watched him go, biting her lip. She took several more slow sips of her new drink, then went out to join the party. Cisco was across the room in a middle of a group of people, howling as they slammed their shots. He grinned at her and made a little toast in her direction before he tossed the vodka back. She smiled back at him, but she wasn't sure he saw it.

When she asked around, she found that Ronnie had left. She thought, _oh well,_ and kept sipping her drink. At least she'd learned something new.


	3. . . . Gotten Drunk in My Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caitlin says a lot of things in this chapter about her feelings on her virginity. *These are her feelings and her feelings only.* 
> 
> If you're a virgin and you know you're not ready to change that, then I hope this chapter doesn't make you feel ashamed or pitiful. You're not. You're exactly where you need to be. If you're a virgin and you're annoyed and frustrated like Caitlin is . . . well, I hope I wrote it right for you.

Caitlin braced herself against the side door of Thawne house. Several plastic bags dug unmercifully into her wrists as she struggled to get her key into the lock. Suddenly, it opened from the other side and she fell through. Bags went flying and bottles rolled over the tile floor. "Dammit!" she snarled and dove after them.

"Whoa, wow, sorry!"

Cisco was on his hands and knees along with her, picking up bottles. "You should've made two trips," he told her.

Tossing her hair out of her face, she glared at him. "My parking pass is for BFE."

"Ahhhhhh, gotcha." The Branson-Feynmann parking structure, known not-so-fondly as Butt-Fucking Egypt to the students who had to park there, was a clear mile across campus from most of the dorms.

They managed to get several bottles back into two of the bags, but the other two had torn in half and weren't going to hold anything again. He held out his arms. "Load me up."

Taking him at his word, she piled all the extra bottles and boxes into his arms and led the way to her room. With only two bags, she managed to unlock the door and directed him to set everything on her bare desk. "Thank you."

"The least I could do."

"The least you could do would have been nothing. You were on your way somewhere."

He shrugged. "Nowhere in particular. Just out. You didn't kill any plans of mine."

"Did you get locked out of your room?" The doors in Thawne House locked automatically when you closed them, and seeing a student sitting disconsolately in the great room, waiting for their roommate or the RA to come let them in, was not an uncommon sight.

But he shook his head. "Nah, I'm being a good roommate. Barry just got together with the girl of his dreams and, well . . ."

"That doesn't seem fair."

He shrugged again. "Young love, what're you going to do? Looks like you've got an evening planned."

"Oh. Yes." She surveyed the mess on her desk. "I found a list of the top one hundred most requested mixed drinks online, and I'm going to try everything I can to determine which options to add to my repertoire."

His mouth curled up. "Well, that's a very organized way of going about it."

She narrowed her eyes, wondering if he was making fun of her. He just seemed to be generally amused, though. There was a difference between mockery and amusement, and he always seemed to land on the gentler side of the line.

He nodded at the bottles. "I noticed, you don't have any alcohol."

"I don't have a fake ID." Because she wouldn't know where to get one, and she wouldn't know where to start to find out.

He raised his brows. "So, you're gonna make virgin mixed drinks?"

"What's wrong with virgin?" she snapped.

"Whoa. Just saying. It's not the real thing. Like, a Lemon Drop without vodka? Is actually lemonade."

"Well, it's not as if I know somebody who will buy for me."

"I do. Look, I just left the room. They're probably still mostly clothed. If I sneak in and get my alcohol stash, you can try out the real thing. Fair?"

She bit her lip. He did have a point. She'd been wondering how to test these properly. Some of the drinks on her list were all alcohol, except for a garnish or two. "Why would you do that?"

"Life's too short for virgin drinks."

"Just like shitty beer?"

"Shitty beer and virgin drinks are both a waste of your time. Well?"

"All right," she said. "Thank you."

"Okay. Be right back." With the door open, he twisted the deadbolt so it stuck out, preventing the door from closing all the way. It was a trick most students used as they bounced back and forth between rooms, but Caitlin never had. If she wasn't in her room, she didn't want anyone else getting in. If she was in her room, she was alone.

Usually.

She passed the time by organizing the mess on her desk, separating the tools (cocktail shaker, four-pack of shot glasses) from the solids (box of sugar, bag of ice, various garnishes) from the liquids (sour, grenadine, six different kinds of juice and soda).

He came back in and set his own armful of bottles in the space she'd left. They just fit. He had a lot of alcohol.

"Aren't you worried about surprise room searches?" she asked.

"You've lived here nearly eight weeks," he said. "Have we once had a surprise room search? Have you once _heard_ about a surprise room search?"

She was forced to admit, "No."

"Your typical RA scare tactic. Betcha a million dollars that he has more contraband in his shower stall than the whole rest of the house combined." He looked around. "So how'd you get a single?"

It was about half the size of a regular room, and every inch of space was used to maximum efficiency, but it was all hers. "I paid a little extra for it because I didn't want a roommate. I don't do very well with people in general." She shared a bathroom with the room next door, and she could probably count up the number of words she'd exchanged with those two girls without thinking about it too hard.

"I like you," he said amiably.

"I snarled at you."

"You were stressed. And you apologized."

"I stuck a post-it note on your door the next morning."

"Still an apology. Okay, so what've we got up first for your All-American Booze Showdown? I'm sure you have it all organized in a spreadsheet somewhere."

She pulled it up on her tablet. He stared. "I was joking. Holy shit, you really - ?"

She put her tablet face down on her chair, feeling her cheeks heat. "Ha, ha, I was joking too."

"No, you weren't." He picked the tablet up and studied the spreadsheet. "Wow. This is super-organized."

"Well, it made more sense to have multiple categories by which I could break it down." She could see her headings from here - taste, alcohol type, glass type, among others. She felt her cheeks heat. It had made sense when she was typing it up, but now that another person was looking it over, it felt fussy and trying-too-hard. Story of her life.

"I wasn't this organized when I studied for the SATs. This is awesome."

"That's nice of you to say, but I'm well aware I'm a freak."

He looked up. "You're not a freak. You're really, really unusual, but in an awesome way. Okay? Not a freak."

She blushed.

He smiled at her and looked back at the tablet. "Tell you what. Let's try the Lemon Drop again, but with Triple Sec this time."

In spite of his claim that he was incredibly disorganized, Cisco got right into the spirit of her spreadsheet. He walked her through a tiny version of each recipe, watched as she sipped, and typed in whether it was a yes, a no, or a maybe. He also poured a large glass of water every time she went through all four shot glasses and made her drink it while he rinsed them out.

Even with the water, and the mini drinks, and the tiny, careful sips she took, Caitlin could feel herself going soft around the edges after a couple of hours, which had been eight drinks. She sat at her desk, within easy reach of the ingredients and a flat surface, and she found herself slouching into the stiff back of her study chair.

Cisco had finished off a few of her rejected drinks and made a few full-size shots for himself, so he was clearly feeling the effects too. She didn't have any other chairs, so he lolled on her floor, back braced against the fat body pillow from her bed.

If the stray thought crossed her mind a few times about what it would be like to straddle him, put her hands in his glossy hair, and kiss his wide, smiling mouth - well, she wasn't used to drinking.

They also talked in between shots and recipes. She learned he had a brother that he wasn't talking to ("because he's a _dick_ , is why") and two parents, who were still married ("they're okay. Took 'em awhile to get over the bi thing but they're cool with it now"), and he lived about four hours away and he had a crazy jigsaw puzzle of loans, work-study, and scholarships that let him go to school.

"You got loans too?"

"My folks aren't exactly rich. Not like you, Miss Single Room."

"I'm not - I - okay. I am used to a certain style of - but I just wondered why you would shackle yourself to loans. You hear so much about school debt."

He rolled his eyes. "I know, right? Last year, I had two jobs off campus besides my work-study and you know what? I was exhausted. So this year I said screw it and took out the loans."

"Are your grades better?"

He shrugged. "I'm happier. That's what counts, right?"

Hmmm. Was it? She tilted her shot glass up and slurped the last of her amaretto sour.

"Woo, check you out." He leaned forward. "How are you doing there? How many fingers am I holding up?" He held up his first two fingers.

"Two," she told him, getting carefully to her feet. "I can also walk a straight line and I will demonstrate by walking a straight line to the bathroom."

She felt more clear-headed after that. She told him, over the next set of drinks, that she had one sister and her dad was out of the picture ("Divorced? Vamoosed?" "Out of the picture."). While her college savings account would about cover her bachelor's degree (when she said that, her face heated as she remembered what he'd said about his folks), she wanted to go to medical school, for which she would probably have to get even bigger loans than he was racking up.

"You wanna be a doctor? That's awesome. What kind?"

"Research." She braced herself for him to ask why not pediatrics, gynecology, family medicine.

But he beamed at her. "Gonna find the cure for cancer?"

She smiled back. "Maybe."

"Someone's got to."

She drank her third glass of water with her cheek propped on her fist, watching the shift of his shoulders as he rinsed out the glasses in the bathroom sink. He had nice shoulders. Just. Awfully nice. And nice arms, too, she noted.

The fourth set seemed to have all the most lascivious drinks on her list. She blushed her way through the Buttery Nipple and Sex on the Beach before he announced the Screaming Orgasm. "Are you kidding me?"

"I'm picking them at random!"

"Are you sure?"

He grinned.

She rolled her eyes. "Ingredients?" She assembled them at his direction and sipped. "Mm."

"Good?"

"Mmhm." She drank the rest of it.

His eyes danced. "How does it compare to the real thing?"

It had to be the alcohol. That had to be the reason she found herself saying, "Well, I've never screamed."

His face didn't fall into pitying lines. He just shrugged and reached his hand out for the glass. "Clearly, you haven't had the right partners."

"I'm a virgin."

His eyes widened. "Uh. Are we talking technical virginity here? Like, some girls consider themselves virgins if they've only had oral, or they've only been the giver, or they haven't been with guys - "

"I've never had sexual contact of any kind with anybody else."

Several different expressions crossed his face at once. "Okay," he said.

"I'm not asexual," she said. "And I'm not saving myself. And I'm not scared of it. I do want to have sex. I really do. I - I'm just . . ."

"You're just," he repeated.

She finally handed the shot glass over. "Whenever I like somebody - like that, you know - I get quiet and awkward. Then I hang around them being quiet and awkward until they start dating somebody who's not a freak. So it's been very difficult, getting into a position where I could lose it."

He arranged the glasses in a pyramid on the edge of the desk. "We had the freak discussion already, but I'll repeat the basic point in case you missed it: you're not. A freak, that is."

"My love life begs to differ."

"You're taking it all too seriously. It doesn't make you a different person, you know. Whether or not you've fucked somebody."

"Are you a virgin?" she asked, although she was pretty sure of the answer.

"No, but - "

"Mhm. That's the kind of thing non-virgins tell virgins to make them feel better about being virgins."

He looked at her sideways and shook his head. "Okay. Maybe. Doesn't mean it's not true."

"It's not just sex," she told him. "It's everything. I've never had a boyfriend. The closest I ever got was holding hands and one kiss and _that -_ " She swallowed and pretended she didn't see his puzzled frown. "But my point is, I've never even done the things that lead up to sex. Making out. Touching."

"First base, second base, third base," he contributed.

She pointed at him. "Exactly. I'm not even in the dugout. I'm not even in the stadium. I'm at home watching the game on TV. And college boys expect girls who know what they're doing."

"Can I represent the college-boy demographic here?" he said, holding up a finger. "A guy who likes you is there for you, not for some skills you're supposed to have."

"When I told you I was a virgin, you almost swallowed your tongue."

"Okay, yeah, I was surprised - "

"See."

"But it's not that big a deal. You're a virgin, so what? It's not like you're not the last of the white rhinos. There are probably lots of virgins on this campus, for all sorts of reasons. You know, it'll happen - "

" - at the right time," she finished for him. "I know. I've read all the advice columns and things. But the thing they never mention is how to find somebody who's willing to have sex with you. That's what I can't seem to manage."

He opened his mouth, probably to say the kind of thing that Felicity always said, about how she was interesting and wonderful and pretty and somebody, someday, would see that. She didn't feel like hearing it and having to nod and smile and say she knew.

She plowed on, not letting him speak. "I'm _tired_ of waiting and not knowing and having no idea how to get there. And I know that if I do somehow manage to get anybody to notice me, then I'll mess it up because I won't know what I'm doing."

"Okay, look, if he's worth your time, he's gonna help you figure it out. He's not going to be an asshole about it. Not if he really wants to keep being your guy. Not if he's worth being your guy."

"But that's something I won't know until I tell him, and if I'm ever at the point where I'm willing to tell him, I'll be - " She shook her head. "I wish I were the kind of girl who could go out and find a - a practice boyfriend."

"Sexual training wheels?"

Her cheeks felt hot. She felt as if she'd spilled her guts all over the floor and why wasn't he gathering up his bottles and running away as fast as he possibly could from the stupid, desperate, pitiful virgin? "Exactly. Yes."

"There's an ad for Craigslist." He pretended to type. "Wanted, one sex tutor for college virgin."

She looked at him quizzically.

He grinned. "BYO condoms."

"Oh, no, that hardly seems fair," she said without thinking. "I mean, I can buy condoms."

He laughed. "Okay, condoms and other supplies provided. Must be - what?"

"Must have acceptable standards of personal hygiene," she said. "And no STIs."

"Excellent, good start, what else?"

She started to get into it. "Must, um, must be extremely patient, with a good sense of humor - "

"That's pretty much a given for tutors, no matter what your subject."

"Oh! Must have very flexible availability to accommodate the virgin's study schedule."

"Must be flexible in general," he snickered.

It took her a moment, but she felt herself go beet-red. Giggles bubbled up in her throat. "Must be local," she burbled, "and/or provide transportation. I refuse to go picking up my sex tutor on street corners."

He was laughing now, his eyes creasing up. "Really? Because I think that's where a lot of guys get their sex tutors."

She made a face at him, but it broke into giggles. She felt like the alcohol was fueling at least half of it, but the other half was that she'd let this all spill out and he hadn't looked at her like she was a lizard person. He was making a joke out of it, but a joke that she was in on. Teasing her. She liked being teased, by him. A lot.

"Okay," he said, panting from laughter. "Okay. So anything else? Physical requirements? Must be between eighteen and twenty-four, five-ten and six-four, 175 to 200 pounds, no more than four percent body fat - are you into blonds or brunettes?"

"Brunettes, I guess, but it doesn't really matter." She felt the giggles ebb away, staring at him thoughtfully.

"Oh, open-minded, that's good. That'll broaden your options."

Patient. Kind. Sense of humor. Local. You couldn't get much more local than across the hall. Flexible schedule - well, he was taking a lot of classes and he had his work-study job, but his schedule often aligned with hers. She saw him in the halls all the time. Excellent personal hygiene - check. He smelled very nice, and he had a really nice smile, and his teeth were white and his hair was shiny and except for the ridiculous, impossible standards of appearance he was now elaborating on -

"- must go to the gym no fewer than four times per week but not Instagram or Snapchat gym selfies more than once a month and that must always be accompanied by a self-deprecating caption - "

\- he actually fit every one of the requirements she'd come up with on a whim.

She blurted, "Would you do it?"

His head shot up. "What?"

Her face went hot. Her whole head went hot. "Never mind," she said, grabbing the dirty glasses. "Never mind. I'm going to go wash these out, and - "

"Wait," he said, lurching a little as he got to his feet. "Wait. Give me some processing time here, okay, damn." He rubbed his temples. "Uh, this has literally never happened to me."

She marched to the bathroom. "I don't know why I said that." Why had she asked? What had possessed her? Probably about eight ounces of vodka. She would never be able to look him in the face again. She would have to drop out of school. Could you apply for the Witness Protection Program?

"I'm not saying no, here, I'm just - we've both been drinking."

"Yes, I was there." She dropped the shot glasses into the sink and winced as they clattered against each other. No sound of shattering, though.

He followed her. "Did you mean it?"

"As you said, we've both been drinking."

"Right, but - no, don't bite me. Did you mean it? Or was that the vodka talking? Because vodka talks a lot of shit."

She held a shot glass under the running water, watching it fill up and spill over. Had she meant it? she asked herself. Had she?

She dumped the water out. "I want to have sex," she said slowly. "I feel like I'm missing this huge thing and I want to know what it's like."

"Yeah, I get that, I do. I - "

"If you don't want to, just say it. I won't break."

He licked his lips nervously and she felt herself flush, remembering her earlier thoughts about kissing that mouth.

"I didn't say I didn't want to," he said. "I just don't want you to wake up in the morning and regret that you gave it up to some rando when you were drunk."

"I'm not that drunk and you're not a rando, and I think I've made it clear that I'm not giving anything up."

He still looked skeptical.

She swallowed, trying to work out why it had made so much sense before the words had popped out of her mouth. "I like you," she said. "You're nice to talk to. I don't like a lot of people but I like you, and you're attractive - "

He started to say something and she plowed ahead.

"- and I think you find me attractive. I mean, I saw you looking at my legs last night, anyway. And you've been very patient with the drinks."

He nodded a few times. "So, to recap, you think I'm an okay guy who's kind of cute and who's noticed you're hot, and won't make fun of you for your inexperience."

"Basically." He thought she was hot?

"That's not the highest bar there."

"It's not the lowest one either. What is it you keep saying? Life's too short? I feel like the longer I go like this, the more life is passing me by, and I don't want it to pass by anymore."

He gave a little nod, a sort of well-you-got-me-there. He reached into the sink, took the shot glasses out of her hands one by one, and flipped them upside down to dry on the counter. His arm brushed against hers, warm and rough, and every nerve ending lit up.

"Okay," he said quietly.

She wiped her damp hands on a towel, watching him carefully. "Okay?"

He smiled, not with warmth, but heat glinting in his dark eyes. "I'll be your sex tutor, Caitlin."

Her stomach danced. "We'll need protection."


	4. . . . Lost a Virginity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty long chapter and mostly all slow-burn smut with a little conversation and awkwardness interspersed.

"Wow, you just go straight for home base, don't you?"

She flushed. "I'm just not on any kind of birth control and - " Would it be insulting if she finished that sentence?

But he finished it for her. "And you're not willing to have unprotected sex, which, damn right you're not, and neither am I. It's smart, Caitlin. We'll take care of that in a little bit. Just - " He reached out and skimmed his hand up her arm, and she caught her breath as tingles followed the path of his touch. "Let's just, um, stroll up to the stadium right now, okay? Touch a little. Kiss some."

"Okay," she said.

His hand kept going, moving, until it curved over her shoulder. His thumb rubbed over the arch of her collarbone and she thought, _I didn't know I liked someone touching me there._

They were still about a foot apart. Well. That wouldn't work. They couldn't possibly do this properly if she cringed back against the bathroom sink. 

She stepped into him. Their knees bumped, and she said, "Ow," faintly. 

"Whoa," he said, putting one hand at her waist. "Steady."

She had to anchor herself with her hands on his shoulders. They were nice shoulders, she thought. Broad. Strong. All his baggy hoodies hid that. She felt like she knew a secret now. She gave him a nervous smile, hopefully indicating that she liked his shoulders but maybe possibly indicating that she was having a minor brain aneurysm.

He smiled back, touched her face, and then so gently it was like a breeze, leaned in to brush his lips over hers. They were soft and damp and tasted of the shots he'd had, and she felt like a warm, melting pool of chocolate had just opened up somewhere in her chest.

He pulled back and looked at her, one brow raised. 

Clearly it was her turn. 

She copied him, pressing her lips to his. Their noses bumped and he tilted his head. She realized her lips were puckered like she'd bitten a lemon and softened them. She felt him smile against her mouth. 

Oh. That. That was new. She liked that feeling. 

She tried something she'd seen in movies and sucked at his lower lip. He said, "Mm!" and she pulled away, startled. But he followed her, so he must have liked it, so she did it again and licked his lip for good measure.

"Oh, nice," he said against her mouth, and licked her lip back.

Their tongues slid together. It should have felt odd, someone else's tongue in her mouth, but her heart thudded happily. She put one hand up to his face, kissing him harder, and his arms went around her waist. His body was firm and warm against hers and she was getting more drunk on kissing than she had on vodka.

"You like this?" he murmured.

"Yes," she said against his mouth. 

His fingers traced up her spine, a warm line through her shirt, and she shivered. "Me too," he said.

She pulled back. Her breath kept trying to escape her lungs, and she was very, very aware of her lips. "You don't have to say things like that. I know you're doing me a big favor."

"I told you, I wanted to make sure you wouldn't regret it. I wouldn't've agreed if I didn't already want to." His thumbs made slow strokes on her side. It felt - she had no words. "Don't call it a favor. A favor was me bringing over alcohol. Me making you come is gonna be for both of us."

She felt her face get hot, and squirmed out of his arms. "Let's -" she said breathlessly. "Let's, um. Not do this in the bathroom." There were two other girls through what felt like a very thin door right now. She grabbed Cisco's hand and pulled him back to her room, closing the bathroom door behind them. For extra measure, she pulled a towel off her shelf, rolled it up, and laid it along the gap.

His brows shot up. "You plan on being that loud?"

Without thinking, she blurted, "I'm not when I masturbate, but I obviously have no idea how I am with a partner."

He let out his breath. 

She felt her cheeks burn. "Am I not supposed to say I masturbate?"

"No, you say it. Go ahead. Maybe demonstrate sometime."

Her face went hotter. "I, um. Anyway." She decided to kiss him again so she would stop _saying_ things. 

He put his hands on her waist and _mmm_ ed into the kiss, and it made her smile. He lifted his head so he could smile back, then laid a kiss on her jawline, nudging her head to one side, and then little nibbles down her neck. His hand stroked up her back and slipped into her hair, tugging it out of his way so he could nuzzle the tender spot under her ear.

She enjoyed it for a few minutes, but then she had to ask, "Why aren't you touching me?"

He lifted his head again, looking baffled. "For real?"

"I mean, other than where you are. My breasts, specifically."

Maybe he didn't like them. She'd always thought she had perfectly respectable breasts, but maybe - 

"I'm not just going to grab you. I was waiting for the go-ahead."

"Well, go ahead."

He shook his head at her, grinning, and ran his fingertips down the slope of her breast and lightly around the swell to the underside. 

"Are they - okay?" she asked, hating that she was nervous.

"They're awesome," he said, cupping one in his hand, through her shirt. 

She smiled. When his middle finger flicked over her nipple, she caught her breath, and he looked up at her for a moment, smiling crookedly, before he ran his thumb over the same spot. She closed her eyes, breathing in the zingy feeling, and gasped when his lips settled over hers again.

He kissed her while he ran his hands all over her breasts and down her front and back up again, but still, over the shirt, and she thought he was waiting for the go-ahead again. Of course, she wasn't doing very much right now. Maybe it was her turn. Like with kissing.

She put one hand against his chest. "Can I take your shirt off?"

"Your shirt - " He kissed the corner of her mouth. "- my shirt - " the other corner. " - whatever you want."

She grabbed the hem of his shirt and pushed it up. 

"Oh. You. Okay. That's great." He lifted his arms so she could pull it up and off. 

She put her hands on his chest, looking at the contrast between their skin, pinkish fair on tan. His nipples were darker than hers too, and there was a sort of t-shape of dark hair that broke his torso into quadrants. 

She ran her hands down his chest and stomach, cataloging the sensations. The hair on his chest tickled her palms gently. He wasn't rippling with muscle, the way male models or TV actors were. He definitely didn't have a six pack, just a softish belly, mostly flat but with a little paunch below his belly button. 

"You like my _panza_?" he joked, slapping it lightly.

She looked up. "Yes."

He flushed a little and smiled as if he didn't want her to see the smile, and she wondered if anybody had ever answered no to that.

So she took a breath and pulled her own shirt off, trying not to think about her pasty stomach or the weird stretch marks on her boobs. And, oh no, was she honestly wearing the dumb gingham farm girl bra the first time a boy ever saw her underwear?

He looked at her breasts and his mouth fell open a little. Clearly he was okay with dumb gingham farm girl underwear. He lifted a hand, looked at her, and then cupped her breast in his big, warm hand and squeezed softly. He grinned. Sort of goofily.

It was better without her shirt, but the fabric of her bra still muffled the warmth of his hand, so she reached around and undid the clasp, letting it loosen and drop to the ground. 

He grinned bigger. She grinned back.

He covered her breasts with his hands, stroking the skin with his fingertips. She pulled him close to kiss some more. The hair on his chest tickled her nipples pleasantly, and their stomachs pressed together, and one hand slid around to smooth up and down her back in long strokes while he kept the other hand cupping her breast.

Half naked kissing. If they didn't do anything else, this was already a banner evening for her.

"Hey," he said, and let go of her with one hand to pull her study chair close enough to sit down and then pull her down on his lap. "Here. Yeah."

She wiggled her butt until he wrapped his arm around her waist to steady her. In this position, it was easier for him to kiss her neck and her throat and - and - lower - 

When he licked her nipple, she yelped, and put her hand in his hair to keep him there because - yes. Nice. That. Mmmm.

She let her head fall back. The ends of her hair tickled her naked back and his arm was warm and solid and he was warm and solid, and she wanted, wanted, _wanted_.

"Condom," she said in a strangled voice.

He looked up. 

She took a few measured breaths. "J-just so we don't get, um, caught up. And forget."

"Yeah," he said. His voice was very husky. "Uh." He shifted, letting go of her so he could root in his pocket, and paused. "Oh. Shit."

"What?"

He switched sides, then checked the cargo pockets at both knees. "I usually carry one but - yeah. I did. I gave it to Barry."

"Why?"

"Because the dumbass only had like two and you shoulda seen the way they were looking at each other."

She bit her lip. "It's okay," she said. "I have one."

"You do? How?"

She pulled out the top drawer of her desk. "The welcome box. From orientation. Everybody got one."

"From last year?"

"It should still be good." She scowled, pawing through the odds and ends at the back of the drawer. "I swear it was in here - oh, wait! Sometimes things fall out the back." She slid off his lap and crawled under her desk. He craned his neck to see what she was doing. "Aha!" She plucked the little foil square out of the heating vent on the wall -

Just as the heater kicked on.

She looked over her shoulder and met Cisco's wide eyes. 

"Um," she said.

"Nnnngh," he said.

"Maybe?"

"I wouldn't trust it."

"I don't know when it fell out of the drawer. Maybe it would be okay."

He slid out of the chair too and plucked the condom out of her fingers. He held it in the light, and she saw that the foil was discolored and warped.

"Caitlin," he said, "this condom is shifty. This condom would steal your phone, make out with your girlfriend, and water down your beer. Nuhuh." He tossed at the trash can. 

"So we have no condom, unless we get dressed and go out and get one." Was anything even open on campus right now?

He put a hand on her knee. They were both sitting half-under her desk like kids playing secret cave. "It's okay. We can do other stuff. There's so much other stuff we can do."

"I know, but I wanted to lose my virginity."

"Yeah, I know. Look, can I pretend that I'm some sort of sex guru for a moment?"

"Compared to me you are."

"I haven't had that many partners, honestly. Like, three? Maybe five, if you're really generous about how you define sex, and you count hookups at parties. But I can tell you I did different things with each one, and every time I tried something new, it was like another kind of virginity. Dick in pussy is just one option, and it's not even one I've had with all my partners. You would not believe the ways that two people can make each other feel good."

"I think I would. I mean, I do have the internet."

He grinned. "Okay. As your sex tutor, I say that tonight's lesson will be about making you feel good - however we manage to do that. Deal?"

No condom - but everything they'd done so far had made her feel good, and none of that had needed protection. She thought of a few different things and felt her face get hot again. "Okay," she said quietly.

"All right." He skimmed his knuckles over her breasts and kissed her shoulder.

She scootched closer, wanting skin on skin as much as possible. He helped her into his lap. She put her hands on his shoulders - she _liked_ his shoulders, she did - and ran them down the smooth, warm skin of his back. At the very base of his spine there were two little dips, one on either side, and she circled one with her pointer finger.

He sighed against her throat and she felt like she'd found the holy grail. She touched his face and he tilted his head back so they could kiss open-mouthed. She cupped the back of his neck and kissed him harder. Under her - in his lap -

Her head popped up. "Cisco? Is that - um - you?"

He grinned up at her. "Well, it's not a banana in my pocket."

"Um. Should I do something about it?"

He made a small choking noise that she identified as a laugh he was trying to swallow. "Caitlin, it's a hard-on, not a time bomb. I'm fine. We'll do whatever you want to do tonight. Don't worry about me. I mean it."

She worried her bottom lip with her teeth, then slid backward

He frowned. "Hey. Seriously. I'm okay, I can -"

She got to her feet and leaned down to grab his hands. "What I want to do is right now is go somewhere more comfortable."

He craned his neck back until he was studying the underside of her lofted bed. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

He kicked off his shoes and climbed the ladder after her. Side-by side, they just fit. He kissed her neck and shoulders while he played with her breasts, circling her nipples, flicking them with his thumb. He pinched one, and she said, "Ouch, no! Too hard!" and he said, "oops, sorry," and kissed it. That was better and she told him so, and felt him smile against her skin. 

He shifted over her, all warm weight, and switched sides. She pulled her legs up, letting him settle between them, and combed her fingers through the soft ends of his hair. She looked at the ceiling, wondering if this was really her, Caitlin Snow, in her bed, half naked, with a boy between her legs.

His hands roamed over her sides, her stomach, then her hips, and then crept downward to rest on the waistband of her pants. She felt herself freeze, even though she wanted his hand there, but it was the first hand besides hers that had ever been in that place for that reason and _she didn't know what to do._

This was exactly why she needed a sex tutor.

He lifted his head. "You okay?"

"Yes."

"Really."

"Yes."

"Because we can stop," he said gently. "If you want."

She felt her stomach clamp. "I don't wanna stop. Do you?"

"No," he said immediately. "I'm just saying. We go exactly as far as you want." 

"I want to go farther than this. I - I just don't know where to."

"Hmm." He nodded and rested his chin between her breasts. "Okay, so we can keep making out." He dropped a kiss on the skin over her solar plexus. "Maybe grind on each other a little. Or I can finger you. Or I can go down on you. Or, you know, any combination."

She felt her muscles unlock, now that she had concrete choices. She considered them. She liked making out, but she wanted more than that. Dry-humping through clothes sounded kind of sordid. It might be nice if he fingered her, but her own fingers had been in her vagina plenty of times, so it wouldn't be quite so new. Cunnilingus, now . . . "Can you go down on me?"

He smiled hugely. "I was hoping you'd pick that."

"I thought most boys didn't like that."

"They're stupid. I love it." 

"I would have to be completely naked for that, wouldn't I?"

"Not necessarily, but it makes things easier. Look, we'll just kiss some more and whenever you're - oh. Okay." He rolled to the side and sat up as she unzipped her pants.

She pushed them down, along with her panties, wiggling them off, doing her best not to kick Cisco anywhere sensitive. She tossed everything over the side of the bed, and they flumped to the floor. Then she lay back, naked naked naked. She felt her hands fluttering over her crotch and pressed them flat on the bed. Covering herself would be counterproductive right now.

He kissed her cheek. "Okay," he said, running his hand over her stomach again. "Where do you want me?"

She pointed.

He crawled in between her legs, patient with her reluctant knees, hands resting lightly on her kneecaps until she eased them apart on her own. "Spread your feet a little more. Let me - yeah." He kissed the inside of her knee, then smoothed his warm hand down her inner thigh. He stroked his thumb along the crease of her hip, and kissed the inside of her knee again. Her knees fell apart further, and her labia parted, letting cool air into places it usually didn't go. 

"Good," he said, his voice hoarse. "Okay." 

She rested her arm over her eyes, pressing until lightning sparked behind her eyelids. "Should I be doing something?"

When he answered, his breath stirred her pubic hair. "Whatever feels good."

She let out a long measured breath. He pressed his mouth to her lower belly, to the border of her pubic hair, to her mound. Then his fingers slid down, into the folds and nooks of her. "Mmmm," he hummed. " _Mira, que panocha bonita._ " And his tongue followed.

She breathed steadily, feeling the world pull in as his tongue explored. 

"Tell me when you like it," he said, his breath whispering warm across her damp, swollen flesh. 

"Now," she whimpered. "I like it now."

When he licked her clit, she did yelp, once, softly. He heard it, stayed there, focused a lot of interested attention there. Her hips rocked up, helpless, in time with her equally helpless moans as he pushed her higher and higher.

She trembled at the border. If she were doing this on her own, with her own fingers, she would switch her pattern, but she wasn't the one doing this.

"Deeper," she whimpered. "No, don't move - "

"Huh?"

"I - I meant - sorry. I meant harder. But slower."

"Oh. Like - ?"

She put her hands to her face, pressing the heels of her hands to her teeth. _"Yes."_

She wailed into her hands as her orgasm cracked through her like a whip. Three four five cracks, and she fell back against the pillow, panting, her hands dropping from her face to lie useless, curled on the pillow on either side of her head.

She let out a long sigh. He gave her one last extensive lick - she shuddered from head to toe - and moved his head, resting it on her thigh. His breath echoed almost as loud as hers as he tried to catch it again.

She lay enjoying the last few jolts of pleasure and when she could, she reached down and stroked his hair. 

He smiled up at her. "You feel like you lost something?"

She shook her head. She felt like she'd found something. She squinted at him and felt her face go hot. "You have, um, me all over your face."

"Oh, that'll happen," he said cheerfully, sitting up. "Kleenex?"

She found the box and pulled out some for herself before handing it to him. She could hear the shower running or she would have gone in the bathroom to clean up. Sitting up cross-legged, she wiped at herself. Delicious little aftershocks of pleasure still jolted her every now and then.

Funny how she no longer felt self-conscious about her own nudity at all.

She snuck a look at his crotch, then another one. 

"Yep," he said easily, and she looked up at him. He gestured. "I like oral. I like giving it. A lot. Obviously."

Since he'd caught her, she let herself stare at his erection, at the way it pressed against the cloth of his pants in a thick ridge. "Can you take it out?"

He hesitated. "How much, uh, like visual stuff have you seen?"

"You mean porn? Some."

"Okay - "

"But I know those are _wildly_ above average." And she'd been very relieved to learn that.

"Okay, good. I mean, I've never had any complaints. I just don't want you expecting, like, a porn schlong."

"I'm sure your penis is perfectly fine and I'll like it very much."

He laughed a little, maybe at himself. He undid his button, unzipped his fly, and pushed his pants down. Then he slid his hand inside his boxers - Batman, she noticed, she'd gotten oral sex from a boy wearing Batman boxers - and pulled his dick out, and pushed the boxers down too, shoving the pile of cloth off to one side. 

Caitlin wasn't lying. She had seen her fair share of penises, online and in porn and in her anatomy textbook. But she wasn't prepared for how different it was to see it in real life, when it was a body part on a real person who was in your bed, looking at you, and the penis was hard because - 

Well, she hadn't really done anything, had she, except ask him to eat her out, which according to him was enough reason for it to be hard. 

She put her hand out. Just before her fingertips grazed it, she hesitated.

"A-anywhere. Is fine," he said hoarsely. "Just the - um. Head. Is sensitive."

She looked up. 

He was looking down at her hand, with a flush creeping up his cheekbone. His lips were parted, and he panted a little, as if he were flustered. Excited.

Turned on.

Obviously he was turned on. The physical evidence was right there.

But like he was turned on with more than just his penis.

A rush of power flowed through her, and she laid one finger against the shiny, hot head of his dick and traced a circle around the circumference. He groaned, and a little bit of fluid leaked from the hole. She touched it, then examined it on her fingers, pressing forefinger and thumb together to test viscosity.

She trailed her fingers down the shaft, remembering the illustration in her textbook, which she'd looked at for a long time. Glans, there at the tip. Sensitive according to him. She swiped her thumb over the head and he caught his breath. The shaft, constructed of a corpus spongiosum and two corpus cavernosa. Testes. She wrapped her hand fully around his cock. The skin was very soft. It didn't feel rock-hard or anything, underneath, but swollen. Full. Like flesh. That belonged to a person.

All these pieces, put together, attached to a person. To Cisco.

Cisco with the brilliant smile and the two married parents who worried about his school loans for him and the encyclopedic knowledge of mixed drinks and the Batman boxers.

She pulled her hand back up the shaft.

"Caitlin," he said roughly.

She looked up. "Too tight?"

"Uh-uh," he said. "But if you'd really like to try a handjob, can you get some lotion or something? Because chafing is a thing."

She looked at the way his skin shifted slightly under her hand. Probably, yes, chafing was a thing.

She reached over and rooted around in the basket she kept on top of her wardrobe until she found her hand lotion. She squeezed a generous dollop into her palm. Very generous. "Ooops."

He let out a snort that made his dick bounce, and she had to swallow a laugh. "I'll have the silkiest dick in all of Thawne House."

"Plus you'll smell like brown sugar," she said.

He snickered, and she giggled, and put her lotiony hand back on his cock and stroked it up and down. 

"Hnnnngh," he moaned, fingers digging into the mattress. "Can - tighter." A soft flush spread over his cheeks. He looked young and vulnerable, and his cock was so hot in her hand.

She tightened her grip, sped up at his direction, rubbed her thumb over the head to make him catch his breath again. He pressed his forehead into her shoulder, gasping, panting, grunting something in what she thought was probably Spanish. It sounded vulgar and sexy and she thought, _I'll need a Spanish dictionary,_ before she realized she could ask him.

"Cai--Cait. Caitlin. I - _ngh_!"

He went rigid, and she grabbed his shoulder with her free hand, not really sure what to do except keep stroking him as guttural sounds jolted out of his throat in time with the cum spurting from the tip of his cock. 

"Okay," he panted after a minute. "Okay, okay, I'm good. Okay. Leggo."

She pulled her hand away and set it palm up on her knee. He panted a few more times, then sighed, drooping against her. His hairline shone damp with sweat and the ends tickled her breast. After a moment or two, he kissed her shoulder and straightened up.

She looked at her hand, a mess of lotion and cum, and then where cum was dripping down his chest, a few dots on his face and even her leg.

"Sex is _messy_ ," she observed.

He burst into laughter. "When you're doing it right."

"I did it right?"

"Look at what a mess we are." He gave her a smacking kiss on the lips.

The shower had stopped and the light in the bathroom was off. She climbed down the ladder again and went to the steamy bathroom to wash her hand and her thighs, and brought back a wet washcloth for him. She curled up, watching him wipe himself off, and tried not to let her eyelids droop.

He tossed the washcloth at her laundry basket - it missed by several feet - and leaned over, brushing her hair off her face.

"I'm not falling asleep."

"S'okay," he said, kissing her forehead. "Sex is also tiring. Go to sleep." He tugged at her extra pillow but she didn't work out what he was doing until he tossed it over the side onto the floor, where it landed on the pile of his clothes and hers.

"Nnnnuhh," she said, sitting up. "You don't. Cisco. Not the floor. Sleep here."

"Not much room," he said, halfway down the ladder, looking at the skinny twin bed.

"There was enough for us earlier." She pushed the covers down. "Get back up here. Come on."

He brought the pillow with him and they negotiated wall side or open side. He wanted the wall. He crawled under the covers and she rolled toward him. "What was your first time like?" she asked him.

He looked sleepy, his eyes drooping. "With a guy or a girl?"

"Either."

He put his hand on her hip under the cover. His thumb stroked the soft poochy part of her stomach. "I was fifteen," he said softly. "Adrian Hsing. We were in my treehouse so we could kiss without my parents catching us. It was March so, cold as balls. We were making out and when he asked if he should keep going I said yes."

"Why did you say yes?"

"Because I was crazy about him and I wanted to."

"Was it good?"

He kissed her nose. "It was the best thing I'd ever felt in my whole life."

"And you still smile when you think about it."

"Yeah."

She thought, _I was nineteen and I decided it was time, and I asked him as a favor and he said yes and it was really good._

The memory was only a few minutes old but she smiled when she thought about it.


	5. . . . Kept a Secret Like This

Caitlin snuggled into her covers. Her alarm wasn't going off, so she had some time before she had to get up. She could burrow into her body pillow which . . . was . . . moving . . .

She gasped and her eyes shot open.

Yes. There was someone in her bed, with her. His name was Cisco Ramon and he was in her bed and he'd been more places than that last night.

"Hey," he whispered. "Good morning. Uh. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up. I was just gonna, like, leave a note and go back to my room and let you sleep . . . "

She goggled at him.

He began to look vaguely alarmed. "Um, do you remember what we did last night?"

"I had a lot to drink and then we had sex. Ish."

He coughed. "Okay. Is that okay? How do you feel?"

Her head hurt a little and her mouth felt dry. "Ambivalent about the drinking." She felt her face heat. "Um. Good about the sex."

"Well . . . good. Glad to hear it."

"What time is it?"

"Early. Like, seven thirty."

"Seven thirty!" she shrieked. "Oh my god!"

"Uh - not early?"

She tossed the covers aside and scrambled past him and down the ladder. "I have an eight o'clock class!"

He caught the blankets before they fell completely off the bed. "Where?"

"Nicholson," she said, rooting around her drawers for underwear.

"Ten minute walk," he said, lying down on his stomach to talk to her. "You've got, like, another ten minutes you can stay in bed."

"You say that because you're a boy." She wiggled into a bra and panties. No time to shower. Absolutely no time. Damn. "I have to pick out an outfit and do my makeup and - ugggghhhhh!" She ran into the bathroom. The shot glasses were still there, arranged in a neat line next to the sink.

"You don't have to look perfect, not for an eight o'clock class," he called into the bathroom.

"I have never attended class in my pajamas and I intend never to do so," she yelled back, spraying dry shampoo through her hair. She whipped her brush through it, wincing, and twisted it up in a clip. Then she washed her face, and ran back to find an outfit as she brushed her teeth.

She dripped toothpaste on her first choice of tops and swore mintily, tossing it aside. She grabbed her second choice, raced back in the bathroom, and spat and rinsed before pulling the top over her head. She stuck out her leg, critically assessing her leg-hair state, and decided the day called for pants. She ran back, moisturizing her face as she went, and found the precise pants she needed, careful to grab them with her non-moisturizing hand.

He was out of bed and getting dressed, and she felt momentarily guilty. If he thought seven-thirty was early, he probably didn't want to be awake right now.

"You don't have to get up," she said, pulling her pants on and zipping them up. "I'm sure you can stay in bed ten more minutes."

"I can stay in bed for like two more hours. I don't have class until ten. I'm gonna go get in my bed, though."

"Oh, right. Um, Cisco?"

"Mmm?" He was gathering his alcohol up from the desk, checking to make sure the tops were tight.

She busied herself packing her backpack, trying to sound casual. "When does your last class end today?"

"About four-ish."

"My last class is over at two. Would you like to come back here about four-thirty and, um, continue the sex lessons? Help me get rid of more of my virginities?"

"Yeah," he said. "That'd be - yeah, sure. You want me to bring the condoms?"

"Oh, no, I'll provide those."

"Okay, then."

"Okay. Thank you."

He laughed in an incredulous way and said, "If I say, 'no, thank _you_ ,' that would be totally sleazy, but . . . yeah. It's not like I'm not getting something out of it. See you later, Caitlin."

* * *

 Cisco knocked on his door and called out, "I'm comin' back in! You'd better not be naked!"

When he got no answer, he unlocked it and slid in, ready to slam his eyes shut in case Barry's bed was occupied. Nope. Empty. He blinked at the room for a few minutes, then heard the shower running.

He'd put his stash back in the wardrobe, stripped back down to his boxers and was crawling into his own bed when Barry came out of the bathroom. "Hey, dude!"

"Hey," Cisco said. "Where's Iris? Is she in there? I'll close my eyes."

"She went home around midnight. I texted you."

"Uh, yeah, I guess I missed it." As far as he could estimate, around midnight, he'd been coming under Caitlin Snow's awkward, untutored, very eager hands.  
Honest to god, he'd never done anything like that before. Sure, he'd hooked up with people, but he'd never gone so quickly from, _Hey, you're reasonably cool_ to _oh and now we're naked together_ in such a short time. Even when you factored in their meeting at the party two nights ago. He'd thought she was just a weird neighbor, kind of cute but also tense and grouchy. But the serious way she'd attended to his mixology lesson, and the way she'd laughed had made him think, _Well, she's pretty neat._

Just not in a way that had made him anticipate being the first guy to eat her out less than twenty-four hours later.

And now he was planning to have more sex with her.

Huh.

"Hey, thanks for clearing out," Barry said over his shoulder as he pawed through his drawers for clean underwear. "I owe you one, man."

"No big."

"Where'd you go, anyway? I thought you might have crashed on the couch in the great room but I checked and you weren't there."

"Actually, I went across the hall."

"Where?"

"You know that one girl? Right directly across the hall?"

"Wait, the one who yelled at us last month?"

"She's actually pretty cool. We chilled and drank and talked for awhile, and she let me sleep there."

"On her floor? Did she let you have a pillow and a blanket at least?"

Cisco shrugged, not bothering to correct him because - actually, he didn't know why. He wasn't sure how to describe what they'd done, even to himself. "It was fine, man."

Barry turned right around to peer at him. "And you slept?"

"Like a baby." He hadn't slept that well since August, it seemed like.

"Well. Cool. Good."

"Yep. So, good night for you?"

Barry got a dopey look on his face. "I - can't even - like, it's different. When you're in love. It's so - It's amazing."

"It's not so bad the other way," Cisco observed, remembering how it had felt to kiss Caitlin's soft breasts and feel the quiver in her thighs when he flicked her clit with his tongue.

"Sure, yeah, I know, but when you add love to it - "

"Okay, Byron, I get it. Ten out of ten."

"More like fourteen." Barry shook his head and sighed, looking like a lovestruck moron. But at least now he was a happy lovestruck moron, and not a pining one. That was a nice change. "I swear, we did things - "

Cisco held up a hand. "TMI, man. T. M. I."

Barry laughed. "Okay. But. We went at it a lot. A lot of times." He grinned. "A loooooot."

"You used them all, didn't you?"

"Yep. Had to get creative once we had."

"Horny bastard."

Barry laughed again.

Cisco fished around for his phone in his discarded pants pocket and set the alarm. Noting the time, he told Barry, "You'd better get going," tucking his phone under his pillow. "You're gonna be late to class."

"Oh, yeah, right!" Barry yanked on a t-shirt, grabbed his jacket and his backpack, and paused. "Hey, I'm probably going to hang out with Iris at her place after class."

"So I won't see you for about a week, is what you're saying?"

"Well - I mean - "

"Dude, it's fine. You've been looking after me since we got back to school, you can give it a rest. Go be in love. Get laid until your dick falls off from exhaustion. That's an order."

"Gross," Barry said, but he grinned a total shit-eating grin and went out the door.

Cisco closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking of Caitlin. Her breasts, her skin, her hands, her wide curious eyes. Of what they were planning to do in about eight hours. Of how he was going to be her actual first - he'd never been anybody's first before. Pretty much not for anything.

Everything with her was going to be new.

His phone buzzed, and he blinked his eyes open. What, already? It didn't feel like he'd slept -

But it was a reminder buzz, with the attached message _Call Nana 4 B-Day!!!_

He swiped to get rid of the message, tossed his phone to the floor, and burrowed into his pillow again, fingers twisted in his bedspread.

He stared at the underside of Barry's mattress for a minute or two, then let out his breath and climbed out of bed. He wasn't going to get back to sleep. He found his tablet on his desk and sat back on his bed, settling his shoulders against the wall. When he searched "sex with a virgin," he got fewer porny results than he'd thought. He checked the time and clicked the link to the Reddit thread.

* * *

Caitlin had class all morning. She listened to the lectures, she took careful notes, and if there had been a pop quiz at the end of each class, she would have bombed them all spectacularly.

She kept thinking, _I'm going to lose my virginity today._

Because, yes, she understood Cisco's point about different sexual acts each being their own special kind of new, but it didn't stop her from thinking of his penis in her vagina as capital S Sex, and the moment he pressed into her (would it hurt? it was supposed to hurt) as the real moment when she lost her virginity.

She wasn't stupid enough to think that penetrative sex would make her a woman. That was ridiculous. Besides, she was nineteen years old, she was already a woman.

It still felt like a boundary, though.

Not that the things they'd done last night hadn't been - well. She flushed all over, remembering the sounds he'd made under her touch, the way he'd sucked on her lip and her nipple and the tender inside of her thigh. Not to mention -

She swallowed and squeezed her knees together, hoping she wasn't beet red. She hyper-casually rested her cheek on her fist. Her skin felt hot to the touch. She felt hot all over.

The funny thing was, she kept waiting to feel different. She didn't, even though her heart thudded wildly every so often and her skin tingled with memory. She still felt like herself. And when she checked in with her body, it still felt like hers. More hers, if that made sense, even though there had been someone else's hands and fingers and lips and tongue on it, in places she'd barely even shown to her doctor.

She really, really wanted to talk to somebody about this.

She ate her usual Monday lunch in the food court, staring at her phone. She started a text to her sister three or four times, and kept deleting them.

_Guess what, I'm not going to die a virgin!_

Perhaps . . . unnecessarily flippant?

_I'm planning to have sex with a boy I barely know._

Oh, no, no, that needed to go.

She finally settled on, _Can you call me? I have something really big to tell you._

She started to go to the convenience store in the food court to buy the condoms she'd promised to supply (it was good, right, to have your own supply? Wasn't that what responsible, adult, sexually active women did? It wasn't slutty at all), but she found herself walking past it and heading toward the sidewalk that led off-campus.

Because everything there was disgustingly overpriced and everybody knew it. Her choice to not go there had nothing to do with the fact that everybody who worked there was also a student, and it didn't have self-checkout machines where nobody but you and the computer knew what you were buying.

Anyway it was a nice day for a walk, and six or seven blocks off campus to the Walgreen's and then back to Thawne House, was a perfect amount of exercise. Yes. Perfect.

At the drugstore, she strolled too-casually through the condom aisle two or three times, baffled and overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices. Bare and Ecstasy and Skin and Pleasure blared across the glossy cardboard and made her skin hot to the touch again. She took boxes, put them back, and then changed her mind and returned them to her basket before bolting for the auto-checkout.

She was walking down the street, hoping the coolness in the air would account for the flush in her cheeks and wondering if she should have double-bagged them because the plastic bag was partially transparent and it felt like everyone could see. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out, hoping to see a return text from her sister.

Instead it was a Google alert. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, studying the small amount of information on the screen.

Both her mother's and her sister's names.

Oh.

When somebody bumped into her and then cursed at her, she scowled and moved off to the side, leaning against the wall of a pizza place. She opened the article, squinting to read it, and wished she hadn't.

Of course, she always wished she hadn't, when her mom was mentioned. Nobody ever said kind things about Anna Smoak. She swallowed her own bile a few times before dialing her sister's number.

"Caitie!" Felicity sounded chirpy and happy. "Sister mind meld, I was just about to call you. What's this big news?"

"Did you - " She swallowed. "Do you follow RealDirt.com?"

Felicity's voice went flatter than day-old soda. "Oh, my god. You saw that?"

"So you do know." She tried not to remember the leering article beneath the photo of Felicity out on the town with her boyfriend of a month.

"'Guess we all know how Felicity Smoak got such a plum internship at Queen Enterprises.' Yeah, I read it. So did Oliver. And believe me, his lawyers are gonna earn their paychecks."

"'The ho doesn't fall far from the tree,'" she said, and her voice cracked. "Did you see that?"

_She seems to have learned her lessons at Mommy Sluttiest's knee. Smoak is the older daughter of Anna Smoak, and we all remember her. Gotta wonder where the younger one is now, and what, or who, she's doing to get ahead._

"It's a trash article from a trash website, and how did you find it, anyway?" Before Caitlin could answer, she said, "Oh my god. You still have a Google Alert for all our names, don't you?"

"I think it's better to know."

"I honestly don't get you sometimes, Caitlin. I mean, you do everything possible to escape this and then you keep dragging yourself back in."

"I don't understand how you can be so blase."

"I'm not blase. I'm just not fooling myself. No matter how far away you go, or how many times you change your name - "

"Only once," Caitlin snapped. "And only the last name." It actually wouldn't be that hard to dig her up, if somebody wanted to. Snow had been her grandmother's maiden name. She swallowed a knot of fear.

"Yeah, yeah. No matter what, we will always be our mother's daughters."

"And our father's," she said.

"Funny how that never gets mentioned." Felicity sighed. "You can either let it define you, or - "

"You can define yourself," Caitlin chanted along.

"So you were listening, all those times I've said it."

"It's not that easy." She started walking again.

"I didn't say it was easy."

They fell silent. Caitlin kicked a few leaves.

"Anyway. Whatever. Oliver's lawyers will hand them their trashy muck asses, and they'll yell about freedom of the press, which, don't make me laugh, and it's honestly out of my hands and I'm fine with that. So. Anyway. What was this big news? Tell me it wasn't that stupid article."

"No, I - " _I had sex. I'm going to have sex. I -_ "I went to a party. Over the weekend."

"A party?"

"I don't go to a lot of parties. And I know how you like to hear about me doing normal things."

"I like to hear about you being happy and having a good time at college. That's what it's for. So, good party?"

"Ronnie Raymond was there."

"Oh, the crush! Did he swear his undying love already?"

"No. But we said hi."

"Well, that's - cool. Good."

"And I - I made a friend."

"That's cool too. Does she live on-campus? Can you hang out?"

"Uh - in my dorm. We're hanging out later." She didn't' know why she didn't correct Felicity. It just seemed easier not to.

"Even better. What are you going to do?"

_Each other,_ she thought. "I don't know. Stuff."

"You don't have an eight point plan with subheadings?" her sister teased.

She frowned. Wow. She had not thought about this at all, had she. "No," she said.

How very out of character for her.


	6. . . . Been Anybody's First

Cisco was fumbling with his keys when he heard a door open behind him. He turned and saw her standing in her doorway, wide-eyed, biting her lip.

"Hey," he said, soaking in the sight of her. She was always so neat and pretty and put together. He'd always liked it, even when she was standing at his door at eleven-thirty at night, breathing fire about people who were _trying_ to _study_ , don't you have any _common courtesy,_ were you _raised in a barn,_ yes well headphones would be _quite acceptable THANK YOU._

Now that he'd seen her all soft and laughing, her hair falling down into her face, her lipstick kissed off, he liked it even more.

"Hi," she said. "Did your class get canceled?"

"Nope. Couldn't concentrate for some reason." He waggled his brows, hoping to make her laugh.

She bit her lip instead. "Cisco," she said, scooting across the hall and tucking herself into the door frame next to him like they were KGB-era CIA and she was about to pass him a microchip that held super-classified secrets. "Cisco, did you tell anyone?"

"No," he said.

"I mean, because I know boys brag."

"No."

"Not even your roommate?"

"No, he said a third time. "I don't know what kind of boys you know, Caitlin, but I'm not going to tag you on Facebook when I get laid."

"I don't have a Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Snapchat. Or anything."

"What, really?" He blinked at her, then shook his head. "Uh, that's kind of sideways from my point, about how I'm not a dirtbag."

She blushed. "I don't mean to be insulting."

"And yet you managed."

She looked stricken. "I'm sorry. I just don't think the fact that you're - you're tutoring me is anybody's business but ours."

Oh.

She was still so embarrassed about her own inexperience. He wished she could believe that TV lied, that most kids in Thawne House weren't getting it on all day every day. That for pretty much everybody he knew who was single and a lot who weren't, having sex was a banner event, worthy of being put on Twitter except that it would be kind of tacky.

He softened. "Hey. It's okay. I know you're a private person. If you don't want me to mention it, I won't."

"I don't."

"Okay then."

She still looked twitchy. Tense. Uhoh. He swallowed. "Uh. Did you change your mind? Is that what you're going to tell me?"

"Change my mind?"

"About having sex. I mean, I understand if you did but, it's just. Because you said you felt good about what we did. When I asked." She'd been all cuddly and rumpled and cute this morning, her eyebrows crinkled up as she considered the question like it was nuclear physics.  
  
"I did. I do! I liked it." She blushed. "A lot. I just think - I-I think we need to work out some ground rules."

He felt his shoulders unknot. He did have a tendency to jump into things, so probably that was a good idea. And she was a ground-ruley kind of person. If ground rules would make her feel better, then, okay. He unlocked his door. "Can we work out ground rules in my room? Because my shoulder's falling off."

"Oh. Of course."

"So, welcome to the Cisco and Barry Man Cave," Cisco said, gesturing her in with a sweep of his arm. "You're lucky, it still smells all nice. Barry, like, purged it yesterday. I think he had to burn some of my socks."

She wrinkled her nose. "Thank you." She wandered around a little while he shed his monstrous backpack and his jacket. "Your view is very pretty," she observed, looking out the window into the ravine.

"I guess," he said, although he and Barry had put the big, ratty armchair right in the window nook so they could look out at the trees while doing homework.  
She settled herself in the chair, tucking her legs up under herself. He decided not to tell her that they'd found the chair by the dumpsters at the end of spring semester. It was totally clean now anyway - Barry's dad had made sure of that.

He dropped into his desk chair. "Okay," he said. "Ground rules."

"First of all," she said very fast, "Don't worry about me being clingy or anything. This isn't like that. I don't expect a relationship, just sex lessons. And you're quite free to - you know - sleep with other people while we're doing this, although I'd appreciate it from a health standpoint if you'd let me know."

"Well," he said slowly. "I'm not really the best juggler, so I'll probably just be doing you. So to speak. But, hey, if you want to have sex with someone else, I'm okay with that, as long as I know about it."

She blushed and said, "Cisco, you know for a fact I've never had the opportunity before, and I don't see that changing anytime soon."

"What I know is, I've been seeing you around since August. And by your own admission you're not that great with people, so you probably don't realize it when other people notice that you're beautiful and sexy and smart. So. If you do realize it, and you do want try someone else out, give me a heads-up. No big."

She didn't respond to the compliment, beyond ducking her head. "I don't think I could juggle people, either," she said, playing with the edges of her sleeves. "Why don't we agree to be monogamous? And then when one of us - " From the way she glanced up, then down again, he was pretty sure she meant _you_ "- is interested in someone else, we'll just end things. No big."

"Okay," he said. "That works too."

"Second, um, I - I'd rather we kept this strictly between ourselves."

"I already agreed to that. I mean, I'll be honest. If the subject comes up, I'll say I'm sleeping with someone. I won't bring your name into it if you'd rather I didn't. But you know, this isn't the 1880s and you won't - "

She snapped, "I don't like people talking about me."

He eased back. This was a sore spot he hadn't anticipated. This was more than fanatical privacy or embarrassment. This was . . . none of his business right now. "Okay. Gotcha. Loud and clear."

She nodded, looking tense and twitchy again.

"This thing, it's classified top secret," he added.

"Thank you."

"Yeah."

"Last. Um. I - " She looked at the ceiling. "I've read a lot. About sex. About things you can do. And I'm interested in, um, a lot of it. So if I suggest something that makes you feel uncomfortable or you don't want to do it, please tell me and we won't do it, I promise."

"Uh - " Well. Holy crap. "First of all, just how kinky do you think you are?"

She blinked at him. "I don't know," she said. "I want to find out. That's the whole point."

He shook his head, smiling at her. "Okay," he said. "Thanks for laying that out. Agreed. And same goes for you. Like I said last night, you can always say no. Don't feel like you have to try everything right away. Even if I suggest it. Even if you suggest it."

"Okay," she said quietly, suddenly very interested in her sleeves again.

He got up and crossed the room to sit on the end of his bed. Their shins bumped. "Hey," he said.

She peered up at him.

"You got any more ground rules?"

She shook her head.

He put his hands on her knees. Even they felt tense. How did she do that? He said in his lightest, most no-big voice, "What do you want to do?"

When she blinked at him, he added, "You're running the show today, Caitlin. You only get one first time. What do you want to do right now?"

She nibbled her bottom lip. He thought, _that's my job_ , but held himself back. She wasn't all shiny-eyed and flushed with alcohol right now. All her inhibitions were fully in place.

"Um," she said. "I've, I've read that it works better if we do - if we have some foreplay first."

"I've read that too," he said, tracing little circles on her leg.

She smiled at him, and sobriety or no sobriety, he couldn't resist leaning in and kissing her nose. To his delight, she tilted her head up and kissed him. Lightly, not the deep, dirty kissing that he'd been thinking about all day, but closer to it than not kissing at all.

He touched her face and kissed her harder, hoping to burn off some of that knotted tension. She kissed him back, serious, puckery-lipped, until he licked her mouth to remind her and then it was like _oh! right. This way,_ and the kiss she gave him then made lightning crackle up his spine.

He slid his hands further up her legs. He thought of them wrapped around his waist and lost his breath almost entirely.

She scooted forward, her knees parting so they bracketed his, and put her hands to his chest as they kissed. "Your roommate," she sighed. "Where - mmm." She ran her hand down his front, then curled her fingers into the button-down he wore loose over his favorite Dr. Who shirt. "Where is he?"

Roommate? He had a roommate? He had a room? Cisco tried to carve out a few brain cells. "Uh? Um, I think - Bare said he was going to his girlfriend's tonight, so I don't expect to see him for like three days."

"Good. Can we use your bed?" she asked, pushing his button-down off his shoulders.

He shrugged it off the rest of the way and started peeling off the t-shirt he wore under it. "Bed, floor, wall, chair, ceiling - "

"Wait." She sat back, to his enormous disappointment. "I need - I got some things. I'm going to get them. From my room. Don't move."

"Don't think I can," he said.

She looked at his lap, smiled, and bolted.

He sagged a little, panting. What the hell kind of ideas did she have? Some of the ones in his head drove more blood to his lap. Reddit had not said anything about this.

She came back and he smiled at her. She smiled back.

Then he spotted the bulging bag in her hand and sat up. "Caitlin? Is that all - ?"

"Most of it." She dumped out box upon box of condoms. "I did buy a couple of candy bars."

His mouth fell open. "Oh, my god. I'm gonna die happy."

She went red. "Did I go overboard? I didn't know if you had a latex allergy or what size or - "

"Look, the important part of that statement was 'happy.' Holy shit." He picked up a box. "Why'd you even bother with the variety pack? Seems like you've got all the options covered already."

"I thought I might as well." She frowned at it. "Although it says it has flavored condoms, and why would you flavor a condom?"

He paused in the middle of prying the package open and let the wicked grin spread over his face.

Her eyes widened. She looked intrigued, not shocked. "Really?"

"Some people don't like the taste of cum. They'd rather taste - " He upended the package and chose a flavored one. "Strawberry banana instead. So many jokes right now. So many."

She giggled and plucked it out of his hands. "Let's not use that one."

"Let's not," he agreed, and reached out his hand to grab hers, to gently pull her down to the bed so they could make out some more.

Before he could, she started shucking her clothes with the same weirdly charming efficiency he remembered from last night. Caitlin Snow, converting herself from Clothed to Naked without any particular fanfare.

He thought, _Someday I'm going to take her clothes off for her, incredibly slowly, and that'll be the hottest thing I've ever seen._

"Hi," he said when she climbed onto the bed, all long limbs and pale skin. "Hi there."

"Hi," she said shyly, buck-ass naked.

He grinned at her and put his hand on her side, stroking the skin with his knuckles as he kissed her.

"Why do you have your pants on?" she asked some minutes later, when they were stretched out flat, hands roving, mouths wandering.

He licked a circle around her puckered nipple. Her skin right there might be the softest thing he'd ever touched in his life. "Because there's a naked girl in my bed and I'd rather touch her."

She started tugging at his belt and he let her, enjoying the sensation. But when she tried to peel off his boxers, he remembered that no matter how much he wanted to be inside her right now, hot, wet, tight, all wrapped around him - it was her first time. The only one she got.

He put his hand on the crease of her hip and said, "Hey. Remember about foreplay?"

"Isn't that what we're doing?"

"Yeah, but how about I, uh, mess around a little? With you."

"How?"

He trailed his hand down between her legs. She considered him, then scooted her feet apart to allow his hand access.

She was damp, but not wet, not yet. He licked his fingers sloppy and slick, and was rewarded when her hips pushed up as he ran them between her folds.

He stretched out, kissing her mouth and her neck and her breasts, as he tried different movements, shapes, pressure, her slickness replacing his as he sorted out what worked and what didn't. She panted, "Put your finger in me, please - " and he did. She was snug and hot - _oh god so, so hot_ \- but not vise-clamp tight so that was good, that was a good sign. He added a second finger when she asked him, and shifted so he could stroke her clit in slow, deep strokes with his thumb as he pressed his fingers in and out and in - "oh," she whimpered. "Oh."

Last night, he'd been a little vodka-fuzzy, mostly just focused on enjoying the taste and the warmth of her pussy, and he hadn't registered much more than that. This time he paid attention, because this was good information, as the guy who was going to be getting her off a lot more in the future, hopefully.

This was her caught gasps, the way her toes clenched in his blankets, the way her hand clamped on his elbow, the wetness of her parted lips and the unfocus of her eyes behind her stick-straight lashes and the flush spilling up her cheeks and down her chest and -

This was Caitlin, coming.

She sighed - "uhn" - when he pulled his fingers out, sliding them across her swollen, tender clit one last time. He kissed her. She smiled at him with her eyes closed and put her hand to his face so he would kiss her more.

He was all right with that.

After a moment, she pushed him away and sat up. He settled back, a little confused, until she crawled to the end of the bed and picked a condom out of the box they'd spilled, messing around.

"Okay?" he said.

"Yes," she told him.

He peeled off his boxers and his dick practically breathed a sigh of relief. He was almost painfully hard.

She crawled back up the bed, stretching out alongside him, and he pulled her on top of him, humming with pleasure at the way her skin slid over his. "Hey."

"Like this?" she panted, propping herself on her elbows.

"Yep," he said. She'd have more control this way, and he had the feeling that meant something to her.

Plus, holy shit, he loved having someone on top of him.

He pushed himself up and cupped her breasts, licking and sucking. She sighed, arching against him, gasping when the wetness between her legs slid along his hard cock. He gasped too.

She sat up on his thighs, head bowed so she wouldn't bash herself on the underside of Barry's bed. His cock stuck up between them, eager. She studied the packet, her forehead crinkled. She tore it open, turned the condom over a few times. "Like this?"

He pushed himself up on his elbows. "Pinch the top so you leave some space. Yeah."

Her hands were tentative as she rolled it down. "You're not gonna hurt me," he told her, pushing his hips up because. _God._ "Your hands on my dick, that feels amazing." He lay back. "Now just - put it where you need it to go, okay?"

She braced herself on his shoulder, maneuvering, still tentative. He gripped her hip, breathing encouragement. The tip slid through her wetness, and then she sank down onto his dick.

He pressed his shoulders and head back into the pillow, gasping, snug, wet, hot, _yes, yes_ , all the way, all the way in, _yes_.

He opened his eyes, panting, glazed with pleasure, and found her over him with that crinkle between her eyebrows again. He remembered how new this was for her, and put his hands on her thighs again. "Okay?"

"Uh-huh," she said, sounding distracted. "I thought it would hurt. Not that I want - I just always heard that it did." She shifted, biting her lip. Several key portions of his brain imploded.

"How's it feel?" he managed, somehow.

"It's, um. Thick. And hot. And . . . different."

"From?"

"I don't know. Anything." She shifted again, all the little muscles inside stroking his dick. He let the moan out.

"Caitlin," he groaned. "Hey. So. Not to rush you, up there, or anything but you're kind of driving me crazy."

She paused and looked down at him. "I am?"

"Yeah."

"How?" She shifted again.

"Doing that," he told her. "Just that. Right there."

"This?" She moved again, deeper, harder.

He gasped.

"What about this?" She leaned over, bracing her hands on his shoulders, and pressed her hips down into his.

He swore, like a prayer. "That's - that's good. That's so fucking good, Caitlin, do it again."

She did, and let out a little moan. "That's so nice."

"Yeah, yep, sure is, _again for fuck's sake._ "

She laughed and rocked her hips. He grabbed her ass, all round and soft under his hands, and urged her on with a flow of filthy words, breathed praise of how tight she was, how hot, _mmmm, yes_ , and her breasts, her skin, _god, Caitlin, you're so fucking sexy, you're so sexy_.

When he touched her clit, she gasped and rocked against him harder. Her arms trembled from bracing herself, and she was breathing fast, her eyes half-closed, her mouth soft and wet and open, each breath catching in a little whimper as she ground down on his cock and into his finger.

"Come on," he whispered to her, "come on, just let yourself - _ven, ven._ "

She threw her head back with a strangled yelp, and her inner muscles tightened around him, over and over again, until all the tension dissolved at once and she slid down onto his chest with a sigh.

He wrapped his arms around her and whispered, "Good?" in her ear. She nodded, and he stroked her back once. "Good, awesome, I'm gonna - " He braced his feet and thrust his hips, deep and slow, then harder. When she made a soft, delicious noise in his ear and buried her face in his neck, he arched up into her heat one last time and moaned.

When the world came back into focus, and he could move again, he combed her hair off his face and kissed her ear. She turned her head, and he studied her, a little worriedly, from very close range.

It had been good for him - like. Really good - but had she had a good time? He'd remembered about touching her clit, which made it good for most girls, and she'd gotten off, but -

She said, "When can we do _that_ again?"

He laughed out of sheer relief, and she grinned widely. She looked thrilled and satiated and a little bit smug and _oh yeah_.

He was gonna die happy.


	7. . . . Hooked Up at a Party

Caitlin sat on the edge of the bed, curling her toes inside her shoes. She checked her phone again to make sure she'd actually sent the text.

_Meet me upstairs, third on the right. I want to try number seventeen._

It had been a week and a half since they'd started their - arrangement? Was that the right word?

She'd learned a lot about sex already - about what he liked, about what she liked. They didn't always coincide - for instance, he loved morning sex, and the only time she'd been able to stop thinking about the time and just enjoy herself was when she hadn't had to be anywhere until noon. With her schedule that was awfully rare. She'd liked doggy style when they'd tried it, and he had kind of hated it because, he said, he mostly got a face full of her hair and it was too hard to kiss her.

On the other hand, they both adored oral sex.

That was a surprise to Caitlin, who'd wanted to learn how to give a blowjob out of a sense of fairness, mostly, since he was so enthusiastic about performing oral on her. The taste took a little getting used to, and the breathing thing, well, she was still figuring that out.

But she loved the heat of him in her mouth, the sounds he made, how completely he fell to pieces under her touch. And of course, he always happily returned the favor.

She recorded it in a spreadsheet that she'd assembled the day after they'd first slept together, a listing of everything she wanted to try, from various sexual positions to innovations she'd read about online to the kind of things that she heard other girls talking about.

Cisco, of course, insisted on calling it her fuckit list.

She did stop short of actual sexting, or photos of any kind. That kind of thing - well, it was dangerous. She trusted Cisco; she just didn't quite trust technology. This text was the closest she'd gotten. She checked again to see if she'd sent it. And that she'd sent it to the right person.

At the thought, she leapt up, her stomach knotting itself up.

Just as she reached for the doorknob, it opened. "Hey," he said, sliding in and catching her around the waist to kiss her on the lips.

"What are you wearing?" she asked, staring. He had on a tuxedo-printed t-shirt under a flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, a trucker hat, torn jeans, and (presumably) fake blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth.

"Coshtume." He flung himself onto the bed and bounced a couple of times. "It ish Halloween."

"Yes, but what is it?" She eased herself down on the edge of the bed again.

"Count Von Bubba, white trash vampire. What're you?"

"A doctor," she said, tugging at the knees of her shapeless scrubs. They were leftovers from her summer internship in a plebotomy lab.

"Cute," he said, sitting up and kissing her neck. "Shexy."

"Not really." She'd seen the nurse costumes that some of the other girls were wearing. All cleavage and short skirts, platform shoes and nametags that said "Nurse Lovejoy." Apparently she'd missed the memo about what normal girls wore to Halloween parties.

"Nuh-uh, I know what'sh under it." He ran his hands up her sides. "Sho shexy."

"Why - mmm. Why are you talking like that?"

"Teef," he said, grinning wide so she could see the fake plastic vampire teeth.

She slapped a hand over her mouth, but the snort escaped anyway. "Take them out."

"Nuh-uh. They're funny."

She shoved him down on the bed and straddled him. She leaned down and brushed her mouth along his jaw, up to his ear. She nipped at his earlobe and breathed, "Take them out."

"Okay," he sighed. "Sure thing."

"Ew," she said, watching him pry them out. "Don't just - here." She dug around in her purse for Kleenex and wrapped them up.

"See?" he said, working his jaw a little and chomping as if to get used to movement without the silly plastic fangs. "Preparedness. That's sexy." He kissed her again, sucking on her lower lip the way she liked.

"Thanks for meeting me," she murmured.

"Like I was going to say no? What is number seventeen, anyway?"

"Hooking up at a party."

"I can handle that." He rolled her under him and kissed her throat. She _hmm_ 'd and got ready to enjoy herself.

It was unexpectedly difficult.

Yes, his hands were in good places. He'd learned them quickly. His mouth, too, and his tongue. She tugged him back up so they were face to face and kissed him on the mouth, and they did that for awhile, until he slid a hand down to her knee and pulled it up so he could settle between her legs.

And that felt good too, the heat and solidity of his hard-on and the wetness between her legs, separated only by a few layers of fabric, but -

This wasn't her bed, or his. The sounds of the party kept distracting her. Honestly, she didn't know how other girls did this all the time.

He lifted his head. "Hey. You with me here?"

"Uh-huh! I'm fine. Keep going." She smiled at him and tried to pull his head back down.

He resisted. "Fine? That's the word you're going with right now?"

". . . yes?"

He propped himself up on his elbows. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, god. 'Nothing' is worse than 'fine.'"

"I don't - I feel a little - " She shook her head. "It's - "

"Don't say nothing," he warned. "Come on. I can tell you're not into it right now. What's wrong? We'll fix it."

She worried her bottom lip. "It's just, this is someone else's bed."

"They're giving a party on Halloween. Trust me, they're planning to change the sheets after."

"And - all those people. Right downstairs."

As if on cue, the doorknob rattled. Cisco yelled, " _Ocupado!_ " and someone said, "Whoops, sorry, man!" A girl giggled, the sound moving away down the hall.

He looked back down at her. "So. Weirded out a little, is what you're saying."

"I'll be okay!" she said brightly. "Just keep going."

He rolled off her. "Nope. Not if you don't want to."

"But I told you we were going to have sex."

"It's not hot if you're not into it, okay?"

She frowned at him. "Aren't you disappointed? I could tell you were into it."

"Uh, yeah. But I'm not a bomb. My balls aren't going to explode if I don't come in a specified amount of time. If it's that bad, I have a hand."

She felt her whole face go up in flames, but mentally added that to her list of things to try one day. He'd joked about it that first night, so he would probably be into it, too.

He leaned over her and combed his fingers through her hair. "So. You wanna go back to the party?"

"Not yet." She tugged him back down and slid her arms around his neck. "Can we just make out? Like we were doing? Make out and not have sex right now. Would that be okay?"

He dropped his head and kissed her nose. "Sure." His mouth moved to hers, and she sighed into it, because, God.

She really liked making out.

* * *

Some time later, she called a definite halt, because they were getting close to the point of no return and they were still in somebody else's bed, with people filling the house (louder now; more drunken-sounding, and the doorknob had rattled at least two more times while they kissed and groped). She kissed him on the lips.

"We can have sex later. Back at Thawne."

"You don't owe me sex," he told her.

"I know, but I want to." She tiptoed to the door and peered out. "Okay," she said. "It's clear. Do you want to go out first?"

"Better not," he said, adjusting himself.

She blushed, then grinned. She kind of loved when he was so frank about being turned on by her. It made her feel like a sex goddess.

She snuck to the bathroom and fixed her makeup, cleaning off the fake blood that had smeared on her skin from his face. She hoped he thought to check it.

When she was satisfied with her makeup, she snuck back through the hallway. From behind one door that she passed, she could hear moans and whimpering and a boy saying, "Oh, god, oh my god, oh fuck yes!"

She blushed and walked faster. But she couldn't stop herself from wondering what the boy's partner had been doing, and if Cisco would like it.

She was almost all the way down the stairs before someone called out, "Hey!"

It was Ronnie Raymond.

Caught completely by surprise, she gaped at him like a landed fish.

"Check it out! Doctor and nurse!" he said happily, gesturing between them.

"You're a nurse?"

"Uh. No. I'm a doctor."

"Well, I'm a doctor too. So. Um. Where's the kitchen? Do you know? There are drinks there, right?"

He pointed, and she fled, cursing at herself. Honestly, would she ever stop making a fool of herself in front of him?

* * *

Cisco walked down the stairs to find Ronnie Raymond gently bonking his head against the wall. "What's that for?"

"Ever wish you could staple your lips shut?"

"Only about once a day. But then I remember about eating."

"I do like eating," Ronnie said thoughtfully.

Cisco shook his head. "Let me guess. You made a moron of yourself in front of a cute girl?"

"Got it in one."

"They're all used to it. From you."

Ronnie flipped him off and laughed. Cisco laughed back and continued down the stairs, grinning to himself. He had a lot of ideas about what to do with Caitlin later, but for right now, Jello shots were calling his name.

* * *

The Jello shots were awesome, but he made himself stop after eight of them and drink a full bottle of water before walking back to Thawne. The cool night air and the exercise helped clear his head and move some of the booze through his system.

His dick was pretty predictable - after a certain number of drinks, it wouldn't get hard for a room full of naked Olympians. He didn't want to disappoint Caitlin. She was learning a lot from him; let her learn about whiskey dick from somebody else. A long time from now.

He'd covertly texted her - _still up?_ and she'd answered **yes, come over** so he felt okay about knocking at her door after midnight, once he'd peed out what felt like most of the alcohol and cleaned off the vampire makeup. She opened it almost right away. She was in skimpier pajamas than usual, little short shorts and a tight white tank top, and she'd put on deep ruby-red lipstick, which he couldn't stop looking at because it was such a change from her usual pink.

"Hi," he said.

She smiled at him.

He shut the door behind him. "Sorry about the hour, I got into the party and - well, anyway, you okay?"

She nodded and kissed him, close-mouthed, and he wondered if she was mad even though she hadn't said she was. That didn't seem like Caitlin. Like, she would pretty dependably let you know what she thought, at all times.

He pulled back. "Hey," he said. "Uh. Do you know where I left my vampire teeth? I lost them somewhere and the last I remember you made me take them out."

She looked him in the eye, grinned so the light glinted off the silly plastic fangs, and cooed in a mushy, spittly Southern accent, "Why, I really couldn't shay, Count Von Bubba."

He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the floor. She pulled the dumb teeth out, tossed them away and sat down straddling his lap, kissing him for real. His laughter trailed off as he kissed her back and pushed his hands up under her tank top to find her breasts.

He was glad he'd stopped drinking and come back home.


	8. . . . Had Make-up Sex

_November_

Cisco tossed his notebook on his lap and glared out the window into the ravine. The trees had dropped most of their leaves and what was left were withered and brown and soggy from the grungy weather. He could almost see to the stadium now. When they'd moved in, they couldn't see anything out the window but green.

He was supposed to be working on his European History essay, but he couldn't even come up with a topic. Somehow, "Rich White Men Fuck Everything" wasn't narrowing it down any.

His phone buzzed and he pulled it out.

_My suitemates both went home for the weekend. Want to try number fourteen?_

Number fourteen was shower sex. His heart jumped.

Then he set the phone down on his knee and stared at it, pulling at his lower lip. He thought for several minutes, then shoved his phone back in his pocket, threw his notebook on his desk, and went across the hall.

"Hi," she said.

"Hey," he said back. "So. Three days of silence and then, booty call?"

She flushed. "Okay. I know we had a fight - "

"Fight implies two people. You snarled at me and walked out of the party. Do I get to have my half of the fight now?"

"Can't we forget it?"

"I'm not trying to set up play dates for you. That's not what I'm doing."

She crossed her arms. "How would you describe three separate instances of 'hey, Caitlin, you should come along!'"

"Suggesting that you maybe join people for a thing is not setting up a play date!"

"Not three times in an hour!"

"I'm trying to help you!"

"You're making an awfully big assumption. That I actually want your help."

He rolled his eyes. "I did not hogtie you and drag you to that party, or any of the parties over the last month. I just gave you the info and you went on your own. You went because you want to be around people and you want to make friends, but something's stopping you. Sue me for trying to give my friend a boost, okay?"

"I only asked you to give me lessons in sex, not any other kind of interpersonal intercourse."

"This has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being your friend. Look, it's like this, dummy. I like you. And I like them. And when I like people, I think the odds are pretty high they'll like each other, and I want to make that happen."

"Of course people like you! You're funny and you're friendly and you're, you're _warm._ I'm not any of those things."

"No, you're not me, but you're smart and you're hilarious and you get shit done and you're anything but cold. But nobody gets to see that side of you, and I pretty much think that sucks for everyone."

"I can't control it. The way I am with people. It's like my spine locks up or something."

"You need to relax. People are generally pretty okay, you know? Look, I don't know who was judging you so much, but nobody is now."

She flinched, and he wished he could stuff the words back in his mouth. At the same time, her reaction told him that he was exactly right about why she got so stiff and awkward.

"I am the way I am, Cisco, and nothing's going to change."

"Look me in the eye and tell me you're not lonely. That you don't want to make friends. That you don't want to connect with other people."

She stared him down, and he was just starting to think he'd messed everything up when her eyes dropped. "So what if I do? Making me your personal charity case isn't going to help me relax."

"I'm not - !"

"Three times! Once is reasonable, three times is not, and you always do that!"

"I - " He stopped. "No, I - " He stopped again.

She crossed her arms.

"Shit," he said. "I do, don't I?"

She nodded.

"Do you really feel like a charity case?"

"Not when it's just us. But when you're making such a point of introducing me to people, and telling them all about me, I get embarrassed. I hate it."

"I really do think you're awesome. And I really do want other people to figure that out." He touched the ends of her hair. "But I'll stop if you want me to."

"I want you to," she said. "Just let me be there, okay? Just let me be another one of your friends."

He studied her. "Okay. If you do one thing for me."

Her eyes narrowed.

"Text Iris and tell her you want to help out at the women's center. You still need your hours for this semester, right?" CCU required underclassmen to put in forty hours of community service every semester. Something about character-building.

"Yes."

"And you met Iris. You liked her. Right?"

"Yes."

Like that had ever been in doubt. Nobody could not like Iris West. "And you'll be doing something. Not just standing around trying to think of what to say."

"I suppose."

"So?"

She crossed her arms, looked away. "I don't have her phone number."

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up. "I do."

"What if she doesn't need me?"

Underneath that question, he could hear the real one: _What if she doesn't want me?_

He answered both. "Trust me, she does."

She shook her head. "Give me that." She grabbed his phone. Then she had to ask him to unlock it and find Iris's number. He grinned at the top of her head while she punched out the text on her own phone, scowling. "Okay," she announced. "Done. Happy?"

"Yep. And you? Are we okay here?"

She gave him a beady-eyed look. "You really will stop?"

"I really will stop. And you have my permission to kick me in the shins if I start doing it by accident."

She nodded a few times. "Then, yes. We're okay."

He kissed her, because they'd been in the same room for fifteen minutes and he hadn't yet. "Cool."

Her arms came up around his neck and she kissed him back, and he remembered it had been three days, actually, since they'd kissed or done anything else, and he pulled her close.

After a few minutes, they had to breathe. He rested his forehead against hers and asked, "So, is shower sex still on the table?"

"Yes!" she said, eyes lighting. "And I bought decals for the shower floor. So we won't slip."

It was so reasoned and practical and _Caitlin_ that he hooted with laughter and gave her a big, smacking kiss. "Okay. Let's go do something really, really clean."

* * *

Shower sex didn't actually work that well.

They both kept bumping their knees and elbows into the tile, and they couldn't both get under the spray at once so at least one of them was always cold, and although he was enjoying soaping her up anyway, she called a halt, rinsed off, and climbed out.

"I think shower sex requires bigger stalls," she said ruefully, squeezing the water out of her hair. "And better showerheads."

"This is not the setting that porn promised," he agreed, toweling himself off. "But hey, I got to grope you a lot. And you got to grope me."

She rolled her eyes, tucking a towel around herself. "All that did was rev me up."

"Do I look un-revved, here?"

She ran her hand down his front. "Nope." She gave him a teasing look and went back into her room.

He tossed the towel on the floor and followed her. "Considering all the effort you put into this, you're awfully chill about how much it didn't work." Of course, she usually was.

They'd tried a lot of things together. Some had been okay, some had been mind-blowing, some had been flat-out disasters. She never seemed to let it faze her, though. Cisco had never been with somebody who was so willing for things to go wrong.

"It's science," she told him, opening her tablet on her desk, trying to hold her head so her hair didn't drip onto the screen. "A lot of things have to go wrong before you figure out what goes right." She opened the spreadsheet program and scrolled down, typing "diff. location needed" next to "shower sex."

He kissed her shoulder. "How about let's pick something we know worked, right now. We're both still revved, Caitlin."

From this angle, he could just see her cheeks plump up as she smiled. "Ideas?" She folded her tablet up, nice and neat, and slid it into her top drawer. Always so precise and careful.

"Yup." He turned her around, tugged the towel off, and spread it out on the desk behind her. She gasped and grabbed his shoulders when he picked her up and set her on the desk. It was a good thing they were doing this in her room. He hadn't seen the surface of his desk since about August.

"Oh," she said, hooking one leg around his waist, then the other. "This?"

"This." He put the condom on, scooted her forward just a little, and kissed her hard. "Hold on."

About five minutes later - because they'd both been seriously revved, like, if they found the shower of their dreams Cisco could pretty much imagine they'd light it on fire together - she draped bonelessly against him and tucked her face into his neck. He nuzzled her damp hair, enjoying sweet, snuggly post-orgasm Caitlin.

"You smell like my shower gel," she said, and he could feel her lips curving against his skin.

"There are worse fates," he said. "What the hell was that stuff?"

She snickered. "Coconut key lime."

"Is everything you own like a dessert flavor?"

"Pretty much." She lifted her head and frowned.

"What?"

"Something's buzzing. Is your phone?"

"Eh," he said. "They can wait." He nibbled at her ear and danced his fingers down her spine. She was just starting to kiss his neck when he spotted the clock on her desk, next to her hip. "Oh, shit!"

She leaned back and raised one eyebrow. "Not exactly what I was expecting at that moment."

"No, I was supposed to meet Barry five minutes ago for dinner. And I flaked out last time." Come to think of it, that had also been because he'd been inside Caitlin. "Eeesh. He must be texting me." He pulled out and took care of the condom, then scrambled around grabbing his clothes off the floor. She hopped off the desk and helped, sorting hers out in the process.

He kissed her to say thank you and grabbed a towel to dry his hair as much as possible. It was cold as balls outside. His head was going to freeze. "Hey, you want to come with?"

"To dinner?" Her voice was muffled because her shirt was half-on and half-off.

"Sure."

Her head popped out the top, and she dragged her hair out of the neckline. "Oh, no, it's fine. I'll eat later. I have to study. Besides, I know you don't get to see Barry so much anymore, and it's hard on you."

"Yeah, it's tough, I just hate him for leaving the room empty half the time." He wiggled his brows at her. "Hey, so, this _is not_ a play date, but what do you think? You comin' to the thing I was talking about before? It's next Thursday."

She got the same look on her face as when he was trying to convince her to text Iris. "I don't - I have some tests - Do I have to RSVP?"

"Why, yes, have your butler deliver your card in person by tomorrow at the latest. Jesus, Caitlin, it's a dumb college club social, just show up. We're fundraising for the teen shelter. Trust me, they're not gonna kick you out."

She bit her lip.

"I promise I'll ignore you. Well, not ignore you. But I'll introduce you and that's it, honestly."

"Maybe."

"The _kids_ ," he said. "The poor kids, kicked out because they like to kiss the wrong people. Think of their sad little faces, Caitlin."

She let out a sigh. "Strong maybe. I'll try."

From her, _I'll try_ was as good as _I promise_ from most other people. He grinned and gave her one last, quick kiss. "You're awesome. Later." He ran, texting Barry, _On my way._


	9. . . . Lied So Often

Barry looked up from his phone as Cisco tore into the food court. "Oh, my god!" he said. "I do have a roommate!"

"Oh my god!" Cisco said, slinging his jacket on the chair across from Barry. "I have one too! It's not a hallucination!" He looked at the tray of food in front of his friend. "What the hell, man. Now I have to stand in that line alone."

"Wah, wah, I was hungry and you were late."

For that, Cisco stole one of Barry's fries as he went. He came back ten minutes later with a tray of his own, and Barry stole one of his fries in return.

"Fuck you," Cisco said amiably. "Speaking of that, how is young love?"

"Awesome, thanks. You should try it." Barry peered at him from under his eyebrows, all sly. "Or . . . maybe you are?"

"Use your words, Barry," Cisco said in a kindergarten-teacher voice.

"I'm just sayin', man, that I never see you, you're not in the room half the time, you're suddenly terrible at answering texts . . . "

"Wowww, does that sound familiar - who do we know that does all that?"

"Well, my reason is that I'm having a lot of sex with the woman I love. And it's amazing. So, I figured, you might be, too?"

Cisco focused on biting into his burger and chewing.

They'd made a deal, he reminded himself. Their deal was that this was just sex, and just between them. He'd promised her. Maybe he did want to share it with Barry, because _omigod, man, look who I get to have sex with!_

But he'd promised.

Anyway, Barry was in love, and he wanted to hear that Cisco was in love too, with some sweet girl or awesome guy that he could hold hands with and kiss under the bell tower. Explaining that he and the girl across the hall were sexual lab partners wasn't exactly the story Barry was waiting for.

So Cisco said, "I'm just busy. That's all."

Barry sat back, a flicker of disappointment in his face. "Really?"

"Work-study, and Calc is kicking my ass, and I've got three midterms in the next week and a half." He held up three fingers. "Count 'em!"

Barry played with his drink, the straw making a little eh-eh, eh-eh noise as he pushed and pulled it through the lid. "How's, um, things besides that?"

Cisco thought about playing dumb, but he knew why Barry had insisted on them hanging out like this. Barry was a good guy. He cared about his friends. And maybe he was possibly feeling a little guilty for diving so completely into Iris West's arms and other body parts. "That's getting better," he said.

"Yeah? You think maybe it's easier 'cause you're not at home right now?"

To see the gaping hole in his family's life, where his nana was supposed to be? "Yeah, probably. I'm going home this weekend, though."

Barry's eyebrows crunched together. "What about those midterms?"

"My tata sold the house. I don't blame him, you know. He and my nana lived there since the day they got married. I don't know how he's stayed there even just since August. Anyway, he's moving in with my folks this weekend. Into Dante's old room. I'm going home to help."

"You have like a million cousins. Can't they help? Why do they need you?"

"They'll be there, too. Look, Mom, my grades are fine. My scholarships are fine. I can take a weekend. And I'll take all my books and shit."

Barry still looked concerned.

Cisco set his burger down and leaned forward. "Bare," he said quietly. "I wanna go home, okay? All us grandkids practically grew up in that house. I want to say goodbye."

Barry's eyes dropped.

When he'd been eleven, his mom had been murdered in his childhood home, and his dad had been the prime suspect. Barry had spent a year in foster care until his dad's name was cleared, and the minute that had happened, they'd moved three states away, where nobody knew.

Barry had never gotten to say goodbye to the house where he grew up.

"I get that," he said. "Okay. I won't bug you."

"Thanks."

Barry picked up his drink and took a long sip. "So is your brother - ?"

"Still a dick." Cisco stirred his ketchup with a fry until it got soggy. "Can we talk about something else, man?"

"Yeah. Sure. Uhhhh . . . so is Mardon's class any better?"

Cisco rolled his eyes. "Duuuuuuude. Fuck. He just announced our final, right? Group project."

"Aw, shit!" Barry said, immediately sympathetic. "Sucks to be you."

"Right? And you haven't even heard who's in my group."

They bitched companionably about their classes, talked smack about their most recent Fallout team-up, and Cisco even listened to Episode 4,875 of Iris West is the Perfect Human Being with a smile. It was nice to hang out with Barry, just them. He was kind of glad Caitlin hadn't come along.

As they were taking their trays to the trash, Barry said, "Hey, I almost forgot. What the hell was up with Across-the-Hall-Studying Girl?"

"Caitlin, man. Her name's Caitlin. What about her?"

"On Friday? At Iris's friend's party? She bit your head off and stomped out. Is she a homophobe or what?"

_"What?"_

"Because as far as I could tell, all you did was invite her to the GSA social next week, and suddenly it's like RAWR." Barry made comical little claws with his hands. "So, all I could figure is she's not down with the gays."

"She's perfectly fine with the gays, man, she was just - she was pissed at me for another reason."

"Really? Why?"

"Uh - I - uh - I lost my headphones and I've been playing Fallout late at night again." He smiled and felt guilty, because there was no way that Caitlin would pull that kind of sideways crap. But Barry barely knew her, so, whatever. "Not, y'know, that late, but she's got midterms and she's tense."

"Oh. Well, you could always borrow my headphones."

"Naw, s'ok, I found them yesterday. And we talked, she's cool. What even made you think of it?"

"Well, I don't want a repeat of the whole thing with Hartley."

"Fuck Hartley," they said in perfect unison. Cisco had gone through a brief, idiotic infatuation with his chem partner early last year, before Hartley had made it clearer than clear that bisexual was the option for children who couldn't make up their minds, and boy, had _that_ put an end to it.

Barry continued. "And I know you think she's cute, sooooo."

"Cute? What?" He looked away, tucking his hair behind his ears. "Psshh."

Barry snorted.

"You just want everyone to be in love. We're pals. We hang. Hey, so, I heard from the TA in my calc class that the physics department is having a thing for some dude, which means partaaaaay. Wanna see if we can pass for grad students and get free desserts?"

"You sure we won't get caught?"

"Probably, but I heard they have a chocolate fountaaaaaaaaaaain," Cisco sang.

Well, that was different. "I'm in."

* * *

On Thursday afternoon, Cisco was ignoring his European History studying in favor of playing Fallout when he heard her familiar knock.

Grinning, he jumped up to answer it. Fallout was pretty cool but fucking Caitlin was better.

The grin dissolved when he saw her face. "What's up?"

She drooped against his doorjamb, looking like someone had shit-kicked her into next week. "Do you have any green tea? The kind in the cans?"

"Sure, but why?" he asked, letting her come in. "You feeling okay?" Campus health wasn't far. Would she let him walk her over?

"I - " She blushed. "I started my period and that helps with the cramps."

"Oh." He blushed too. It felt weirdly intimate, knowing this. Of course, it was relevant information to him. Still.

To cover his own confusion, he dug around in his desk until he found a tall green can and handed it over. "It's warm."

"It's fine." She popped it open and took a long drink. "This is so inconvenient. I have to study and it hurts to sit at my desk."

"Study in bed."

"I'll fall asleep."

"Then bring your crap over here and study in the armchair."

She looked over at the cushy armchair, her second favorite spot in his room, and her face became tinged with longing. "If it wouldn't bother you."

Rooting around for his headphones, he said, "I'd be more worried about me bothering you. It's okay. Come on."

She went back to her room and returned with an armload of a fat textbook and two notebooks and her tablet, plus four pencils stuck in her hair. He refrained from reminding her that actually, he did have pencils, because he knew from experience that they weren't the right ones.

She studied quietly while he played. It felt surprisingly nice, her being there.

His phone rang. People usually texted; only his family actually called. He took off his headphones and put in his hands-free earpiece so he could keep playing.

"Hey, Pop," he said in a low voice.

"Mijo, you look at the weather tomorrow?"

"¿Mande?"

"There's a storm system moving through. When are you leaving?"

"Like, noon? Mas o menos."

"You might be driving through it. Ten cuidado."

"It's okay, Papi, I know how to drive in rain."

"Well, let us know when you're leaving. Your mama worries."

Sure, his _mama_ worried. "I'll text." Before his father could say the next thing, Cisco added, "Before I start driving. And at gas stations. And if I have to pull over."

"Okay."

Cisco paused the game and slouched down into his beanbag chair, switching entirely to Spanish to ask about his grandfather. "Cómo está el viejito?"

"Es dificil. You know."

"Si." Cisco pulled on his lip.

"Dante's looking after him."

Cisco snorted. "Si, Dante. Mira, no voy a decirlo en este fin de semana." He didn't want to get in another fight, and it seemed like every time he talked to his brother lately, they got in a fight. Even on Facebook. Even on Instagram.

There was a murmur in the background. His pop said, "Sabelo, Pau," to his mom. Another murmur, and he sighed, "Your mami wants me to tell you he didn't mean the things he said in August."

Right. Then why didn't Dante tell him that himself? "Voy a creerlo cuando él me dice a sí mismo."

"And you know you didn't mean the things you said."

"Papi," he growled in frustration.

"You shouldn't fight like this. You're brothers."

"Si, somos hermanos!" Did his pop not remember what it was like? He had three brothers.

"This fighting is hard on your mama."

"Yo no comencé." Before they could get in another conversation about who'd started it, he said, "Papi, I gotta go. Debo estudiar, okay?"

"Tienes los midterms still? You said you'd be done by this weekend."

"Uno mas, on Monday. No es importante. European history."

His father snorted. "Los ricos mierdan todo."

Cisco laughed. "I know, huh."

"Okay, go study. Keep your scholarships. Te quiero, mijo."

"Te quiero, Papi." He hung up and looked over to see Caitlin studying him.

"I've never heard you speak that much Spanish before," she said.

He eyed her warily, wondering if she was going to be like Adrian, who used to rave about how _amazing_ it was that Cisco was in touch with his culture, like it was some kind of accomplishment to use his own damn language. "That was my dad, so . . . "

"Yes, I figured that much out." She looked down at her books, biting her lip.

He changed the subject before she could ask what the heated discussion had been. "You feeling better?"

"Yes," she said, picking up the green can and rattling it a few times before upending it for the last few drops. "This always helps."

"Okay, good."

"Can you do me a favor?"

"What's that?"

"Take off your shirt and lie down on your bed."

His brows rose. "Wow. You really are feeling better."

"No," she said firmly. "I'm not up for sex, even if it wouldn't be extremely messy. I'm not getting these muscles of the back and I'd like a life model, please."

He shut down the game entirely and peeled his shirt off. "Since you said please."

She rummaged in her hair and pulled out a felt-tip pen. "Didn't you tell your dad that you needed to study? You can do that while I'm doing this."

He froze. "You speak Spanish?"

"I took French in high school," she said, perching on the bed, "and I caught that much. I wasn't trying to pry. European history?"

He shrugged. "I'll get it done."

"Don't you have a C in that class? A low C?"

"C'mon, it's not even in my major, and who cares about these countries, they don't even exist anymore. Life's too short to care about - "

"Life's too short to fail a _gen ed_ ," she said sternly.

He closed his eyes and shook his head, then dug all his European History stuff out. Propping the book on his pillow, he opened it up. "This is under protest." And also because he felt a little guilty for lying to his papi.

"Noted," she said, spreading her own book next to his hip. Her hand smoothed pleasantly down his spine.

"I think you should take off your shirt," he offered. "Just so I don't feel quite so exposed."

"No," she said, but squeezed his butt before she uncapped the pen and started drawing. The felt-tip pen was cool and light as it stroked over his back. "What are you going home for?"

"Just this family thing," he said, and turned a page.


	10. . . . Felt So Confused

Caitlin slid into the back seat of Barry's car and arranged herself carefully. "Thanks again for giving me a ride," she said to Barry, once he'd finished kissing Iris hello.

"No problem," he told her. "Iris was so pumped when you texted her."

"It was Cisco's idea," she said.

Barry just grinned. "Yeah, Cisco always seems to know the exact right person for a job. I swear if we were dead-dropped in the middle of Alaska, he'd be like, 'Yo, my friend Steve lives around here!' and the next thing you know we're hanging out in an igloo eating seal sandwiches. So did you get a lot done?"

"A fair amount."

"She was awesome," Iris said. "She reorganized the whole interview closet by size and went through three months' worth of donations. The women have so many choices to wear to interviews now."

Caitlin crossed her ankles, biting her lip, plucking at the knee of her slacks. They were very dusty and grimy from crawling around. But it had felt good to bring order and reason to that horror of a closet. "I'm good at clothes."

"Obviously." Iris smiled over her shoulder. "I'm picking you up the next time I go thrift-store shopping because you are _good._ "

Caitlin felt herself flush. Maybe it was just a thing Iris was saying, she told herself. To be polite. But she smiled back.

"Is that the garbage bag you put in the trunk?" Barry teased. "The clothes you picked up for yourself?"

Iris swatted him. "Noooo, those are the clothes that just need some minor repairs before they go back. I think I can get my friend Maya - you know Maya in the theater department? - to work on them." She twisted around again. "Thank you so, so much again. Are you coming back? This was so fun."

"I, um, I can."

"Yay!" Iris pumped her first. "And you're coming to dinner with us right now, right?"

"Uh - " She glanced at Barry, who might object to having dinner with his girlfriend intruded upon.

But Barry nodded, his eyes bright. "Yeah. Come on. It's the perfect excuse not to have to eat campus food."

"Well, okay."

They went to a place in town - casual, but with fancy sandwiches. Caitlin examined the menu minutely as they stood in line to order, thinking, _I am hanging out with people. I like them. They invited me._ It was nice. Even though she was clearly the third wheel to their snuggly couple-ness, with Iris folded under Barry's arm and giggling into his ear, she felt as if they wanted her to be here. Particularly when Iris looked over her shoulder to point out some of the sandwiches that were supposed to be really good.

"So, I have a weird question," Barry said to Caitlin as they claimed a table.

"What's that?" she asked.

"How's Cisco doing, really?"

She felt her cheeks go hot and bent her head over the little cup of pasta salad that had come with her food, digging out the olives and transferring them to a napkin. "Why do you ask me?"

"Because you're pals, and you hang out, and I'm -" he glanced at Iris, who'd offered to get their drinks and was over by the soda machine. "I'm not around so much right now."

"We're not that close," she said. "You've been his friend for years. I don't think I'm anymore qualified to say how he's doing than you are. Far less, really."

"Okay. I thought I'd check. Just in case he'd mentioned something."

"He hasn't. We're really - I barely know him, honestly."

"Who do you barely know?" Iris asked, returning with their drinks.

"Cisco," Caitlin said. She gathered the napkin full of olives up and twisted it closed, then used another napkin to wipe olive juice off her fingers. "Do you, um, have a particular reason to be concerned?"

Barry glanced at Iris. "Well - His grandma died over the summer."

"Oh," she said faintly. "I didn't - I had no idea."

"Yeah. It was sudden. And bad. And there's this whole thing with his brother right now that's sort of related - "

"I know they're not getting along. He told me once."

"Which is really weird, because when we were kids, Cisco worshiped the ground Dante walked on."

Dante. Cisco had never mentioned his brother's name.

"So, upshot, things haven't been exactly perfect in Cisco-land no matter what he says."

She chewed on her lip. "Well. Like I said. We barely know each other really. I didn't even know about his grandma."

"It's not, like, a secret," Barry said. "He told people about it when we got back. But just, you know, that it happened. And then I - I guess he didn't want to talk about it anymore." Barry grimaced. "Sorry."

Caitlin put her sandwich down and played with her drink. "Of course. Obviously. I understand."

"How do you think he's doing, Bare?" Iris asked.

Barry shrugged. "Better? I think? When we first came back, I was really kinda worried. If we weren't playing Halo and Fallout all the time, then he was partying. Then that sort of dropped off. He must've found a project."

"A project?" Caitlin asked.

"Yeah. Cisco gets miserable insomnia when something's really bothering him. So he gets super-social, or he plays video games until dawn, or he finds something and works on it all the time. Usually the project is the best thing for him, when he gets around to it. Like, two summers ago, he was all freaked out about leaving home for the first time, so he spent the whole month of July building a solar-powered car in his garage."

"Like you do," Iris said, giggling.

"Like you do," Barry said. "If you're Cisco."

"Did it actually work?"

"Ummmmm - " Barry rubbed the back of his head. "Not as, like, a functional vehicle. But the roof was an easy fix and he was way less freaked out by orientation weekend, so, call it a win. He's probably working on a personal rocket in our bathroom."

"Not that I've heard," Caitlin said lightly.

Barry grinned. "Well, when he comes back from his trip home, we're going to start watching the Walking Dead. I know he's been saving it up."

Iris made a face. "Baby, I don't know how you watch that."

"Really easily!" Barry said.

"Okay, if you're going watch disgusting zombie TV shows, I am going to have my own movie nights. No horror allowed." She turned her smile on Caitlin again. "What do you think?"

"About?"

"Movies. What kind of movies do you like?"

"No sad endings," Caitlin said. "And no Nicholas Sparks."

"I knew I liked you for a reason," Iris said seriously, and held out her fist. After a moment, Caitlin realized she was supposed to bump it, and did. "Now we get down to the nitty gritty. Costume dramas, yes or no? Because I say no, but with a special dispensation for anything Austen-related or with Johnny Depp as a pirate."

"Belle," Barry said.

"Well, Belle, obviously, that's got a sister in it, gotta support that."

Caitlin allowed herself to smile, and to debate permissible movie genres, and enjoy their company, even though she had a hard time eating for some reason.

* * *

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out, hoping - maybe - for a text from Cisco. He was supposed to get back today from his unspecified family thing weekend. But the buzzing was a phone call from Felicity. She answered. "Hello."

"Hi, lil' sis!"

Caitlin's eyes narrowed. She paused and stepped off the path, cutting thorough the trees on either side until she felt far enough away from the mass of students. "What's wrong?"

"Why should anything be wrong? Can't I just want to talk to my favorite sister?"

"Not with that tone of voice."

Felicity dropped the chirp. "Okay. Fine. I wanted to call you and tell you myself."

"What? What is it?"

"Dad moved out. He's staying at the New Hampshire house."

Caitlin's mouth dropped open. "When?"

"Last week."

"How do you know?"

"I have my little ways."

"You've been keeping tabs on Dad, and you yell at me for a few little Google Alerts?"

"It's different."

Caitlin rubbed her eyes. "They've done this before. A quiet separation. Marcia always takes him back."

"I think this is the real deal."

"Did you tell Mom?"

"Yeah."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing."

"Do you think - "

"Caitie," Felicity said with the utmost patience. "Caitlin. Dad didn't leave Marcia for Mom even when things first blew up. Mom hasn't talked to him in four years. That's not happening."

"Then why did he leave her?"

"I think it was Marcia. I think she finally had enough."

"And they're - are they actually getting a divorce?"

"I haven't seen anything definite yet, but I think so."

"Who knows?"

"Nobody yet. But you can bet it will be out soon. I wanted you to hear it from me. I didn't want you blindsided."

"Thanks, I guess."

"You're welcome, I guess."

Caitlin stared at a tree with a couple of shriveled leaves still hanging onto some skinny branches. "Oh god," she said faintly. "Oh my god."

"It'll _be okay_ , Caitie."

"No. It's all going to start again."

"It won't be nearly as bad as it was. And we'll know what to do. All right? You and me together. Smoak sisters forever."

"Forever," Caitlin echoed hollowly.

"Caitie?"

"I've got to go." She hung up. Almost immediately, it rang again, with her sister's face on the screen.

Caitlin gritted her teeth and shoved her phone back in her pocket. She would call her sister back, but not right now. She didn't want to think about it right now. She wanted escape, distraction, she wanted -

She looked up and spotted Cisco.

His head was bent over his phone, thumbs flying as he texted. Before she could talk herself out of it, she called out, "Cisco!"

His head popped up, and his big, big smile spread out. "Hey!" He waved his phone. "I was just texting you."

"You were?" Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out. Under the missed call and voicemail from Felicity, _Where r u?_ shone on the screen.

She looked up, smiling. "Here."

"Yep." He beamed at her. "Sure are."

They fell into step together. She looked at him curiously. "Aren't you cold?" Although the wind had kicked up and the temperatures were in the forties, he had his jacket off, looped over his arm.

But he said, "Nope. No, I am not. How'd your anatomy midterm go? Was that this morning?"

"I think I did all right."

"Which means you blew it out of the water."

"Thank you for helping me study."

"Entirely my pleasure, trust me." Something seemed very funny to him at the moment. His eyes were all crinkled up at the corners.

"What about your test? That was today, right?"

"Just got out of it. Think I aced it."

"That's great!"

"Yeah, but there were unintended consequences."

"What do you mean?"

"You know associations, from Psych class?"

"I never took the class but I know the concept."

"Right." As he held the door to Thawne House open for her, he met her eyes. His sparkled with suppressed hilarity. "Now I associate all the kings of France and Bavaria and Castile and Leon with you putting your hands all over me."

"What do you mean?"

He looked around the empty hallway, then leaned forward and whispered. "Caitlin. I have the most unbelievably massive hard-on right now."

Her mouth fell open.

He nodded. "That's why I'm holding my jacket. I haven't had to hide a boner like this in _years._ "

She began to smile. "Well. I'll have to do something about that, won't I?"

"I was hoping you would, actually."

She opened her door and pulled him in. The door thudded closed as she pushed him back against it. He squirmed out of his backpack, tossing it aside with a crash. She threw hers after it and pressed herself all along his body.

"Oh, my god," she gasped in between kisses. "You weren't kidding."

"So, so not."

"Okay," she panted. "Okay. I've got this." She slid to her knees, unzipped his pants, and fished out his dick, thick and hot in her hands. He moaned her name when she took it into her mouth.

As his fingers slid through her hair and his heavy breathing filled the room, Caitlin wasn't thinking about her sister or her dad or her mom or the phone call she had to make at all. And that was just fine.

* * *

Cisco said into her shoulder, "Have I ever mentioned how glad I am that you don't have a roommate?"

"It's come up," she mumbled. She felt loose and floppy, soft as ice cream in the sun. She sat in his lap, back to front, her legs spread wide. Her head rested back against her door and his hand was still between her legs. After she'd gotten him off, he'd slid down the door all boneless and pulled her down with him, undoing her jeans and sliding his hand into her underwear.

"Well, lemme say it again. _So glad_ you don't have a roommate."

She smiled a little.

He hugged her around the waist and kissed her neck. "You okay? You were kind of - focused. I mean. Not that I'm complaining. But - are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she said. "And you? Are you all right?"

He laughed into her hair. "After that blowjob? I'm fuckin' superb."

She swallowed. "How was your trip home?"

He went still for a split second, then pulled his hand out of her jeans. "It was okay. I'm thirsty. You thirsty?" He shifted her off his lap and got up, pulling up his pants and underwear and going to grab a bottle of water from the stash she kept on her bookshelf.

He got her one, too, although she hadn't asked. She took a drink, unsure of how much to say. She wasn't supposed to know about his grandma, after all. She didn't want him to think she'd been prying or anything. "Are you still fighting with your brother?"

"Well, he's still a dick, so."

"Have you tried talking to him?"

"He's a _dick_. That's not going to change." He crouched over his backpack, fussing with it.

"I would just hate to be in a fight with my sister this long. She's one of my best friends."

"Brothers are different than sisters," he said, checking his phone. "Look, I hate to come and run, but I picked up a shift for my buddy Ray and if I'm gonna have any chance of getting food before I have to clock in, I've got to hit the food court, like, ten minutes ago, okay?"

"Okay," she said. "That's fine. I've got to study anyway."

"Yeah," he said, picking up his backpack. For a moment, he looked unsure, then he smiled at her and kissed her cheek before ducking out the door.

She sat at her desk, drinking her water carefully and slowly. It was fine, she thought. They were casual friends. Fuck buddies. They didn't need to know each others' secrets. That wasn't what fuck buddies were for.

Maybe she should have said something about her dad when he'd asked. Not the full, ugly story. Just something like, "family drama, you know how it is."

She shook her head hard and drained her water before getting up and changing into clean underwear before settling down to study.

This arrangement, this suited her. It was fine.


	11. . . . Brought a Boy Dinner

Cisco checked the time and estimated that his day had lasted approximately seventy million years so far and he still had about twenty million to go. Wednesdays were long ones for him - he had class all morning and work all afternoon.

For some reason today had been especially sucktastic. It was rainy and gross outside. He'd been late to his calc class so the TA had given him a filthy look as he snuck in. The lines at the food court had been so long he'd skipped it entirely and eaten his lunch out of the vending machines. His boss had yelled at him for getting chocolate on a cartful of old books and put him on computer-lab duty for three hours, which had been three hours of "Um, no, our computers don't have floppy drives" and "you need to have money in your account to print" and "no, I can't retrieve your work if you saved it to the hard drive because our software wipes it clean once your session is done, stop yelling, please, I know you worked for two hours, look, the best I can do is get you back onto a compu - if you throw your ID at me again, I'll call security."

The computer lab had been followed by an hour of shelving, also known as the most mind-numbing pursuit known to man. Now he was winding up his shift at the course reserves desk. He settled down with his calc homework, and almost cried when he realized that he'd used the wrong theorems on all the equations he'd managed to finish in the computer lab, in between moron-tending.

And to top it all off, the tentative text message he'd sent to Dante this morning - _happy birthday man hope u had a good one_ \- had gone completely unanswered and unacknowledged.

Honestly, he thought with his head down on his notebook, about the only thing that would make this day anything less than a complete zero would be if Caitlin was done with her homework by the time he got back, and he could make out with her until the knot at the base of his skull unclenched.

Or even if she wasn't, maybe he could go and hang in her room, working on his own homework or screwing around on the internet, just close enough that he could look up at her serious, concentrating face and smile to himself, because she was so cute with her forehead crinkled up like that.

Wait, what? No. This wasn't like that. They'd agreed it wasn't like that.

He just, he wanted a hit of endorphins. Yeah. From, um, having sex. With her.

He fiddled with his phone, trying to remember something on her list, or something flirty, or even some dumb question, just so he had a good excuse to text her.

Before he could come up with something better than, _Hey, you_ the bell at the end of the counter dinged. Then again and again, ding ding ding, and Cisco rolled his eyes. One of these days he was going to hook up that bell to a small brick of C4 and then wouldn't those obnoxious grad students be surprised. His boss probably wouldn't even fire him because they all hated that bell. It was only there because the director thought it was a good idea.

But it wasn't a grad student, it was Barry, smacking the bell and giggling because he was a dork.

"Quit that," Cisco said mildly, "or I'll put toilet water in your mouthwash."

"Yeah, then I'll put Nair in your shampoo bottle," Barry countered, but he quit ringing the bell.

"Whatcha doing here, man?"

"Homework, can you believe it? Poli Sci is kicking my butt."

"I told you that just because science was in the title, it didn't mean it was actually a science course."

Barry flipped him off, laughing. "Anyway, there's an article on reserve? Under Professor Merriwether." He made a face as he rooted around the unholy depths of his backpack. "It's on _paper_ , like, what the hell."

Cisco went in the back, rummaged around, and came back with the article just as Barry found his student ID. He swiped it through the computer, then scanned the barcode on the article and handed them both to Barry. "You've got this for three hours."

Barry pointed at the large sticker on the cover sheet that said ONE HOUR CHECKOUT in stern letters. "Abusing your power?"

"Like a fourteen-year-old boy with a Hustler mag." Barry would bring it back within the one-hour time limit, probably, because he was a Boy Scout like that, but just in case. "What it's on?"

"The Gordon McDonnell thing."

"Who was that?"

"Don't you remember? Like five years ago? He was running for President, all family values and good Christian traditions, and then it came out that he'd had this girlfriend on the side, this woman Anna Smoak, for years. They had two teenage daughters and everything."

"Oh right. Yeah! He woulda got elected, my pop says." They'd honest-to-god thrown a block party when he'd lost, because the shit that McDonnell spewed about immigrants was enough to chill the blood of anybody with too many vowels or consonants in their last name.

"So does Merriwether. He wants us to write a paper on how the country would have been different if he'd been president."

"Shittier, for one thing," Cisco said, losing interest. "Hey, you got any food in your backpack?"

"Oh, right, it's your long day, huh? Just wrappers, sorry. Want me to go get you something?"

Tempting - so tempting. But if he got caught eating around the books again today, his boss might just have a coronary. "No, I'll have time after my shift. Have fun with your RPF AU, dude."

"Shut up," Barry said. "It's academia, not fanfic."

"Sounds like the same thing to me."

About half an hour from the end of his shift, Cisco started calculating which would be the shortest line at the food court, combined with the easiest thing to take home and eat in Caitlin's room - no, his room. Right. His room, while he played video games or something totally mindless.

Maybe a movie. Maybe a movie that was so dumb Caitlin would get all annoyed with the scientific inaccuracies, because that was hilarious and - he was doing it again.

His phone buzzed and he grabbed it, hoping Caitlin had texted. He stared at the screen and said aloud to the universe in general, "Are you _fucking with me_."

* * *

Caitlin fluffed her hair, smoothing it down over the straps of her new bra. She'd ordered it online last week, in a break from O-Chem studying. She hadn't really meant to hit "purchase" and her only excuse was, well, O-Chem. She'd meant to send it back, until she'd received the package today and saw the color in person.

Cisco loved her in teal. She'd worn a teal shirt to a party last Saturday, and halfway through the evening, had gotten a text that said _Bathroom 5 min._ He'd practically taken it off her with his teeth.

So, fine, the bra was a little expensive. She got to have pretty things underneath as well as on top. Especially now that somebody was appreciating them.

She debated whether to just hang around her room and wait until she heard him across the hall. But sometimes he stopped for dinner, or went to hang out with someone, or went to the engineering building to work on something. So she texted him just before his shift at the library would be up. **Don't worry about dinner. I ordered pizza.**

Her phone bing-bing-binged almost right away with his replies. _Grp frm Hell chng time_

_Mtg right now_

_Sry_

Her stomach dropped. She bit her lip, trying not to write **Whyyyyyyy???** Instead she tapped out, **OK see you later.**

Her phone rang, and she answered it. "Yes?"

"Pizza for Room 23."

"Oh. I'll be right down." Sighing, she put a sweater and a pair of jeans over her pretty underwear and grabbed her wallet and her room key.

As she walked down the hall, she thought gloomily of the large pepperoni pizza she'd planned on eating with Cisco. Now she'd have a couple of slices while she did her homework and spend twenty minutes trying to fit the rest into her tiny refrigerator. Or maybe she would just take her slices and plop the rest on the table in the great room. It would be gone in seconds.

Although -

If his group was meeting right now, then Cisco wouldn't've had time to get dinner. He was probably ravenous. They could still eat it together. He could take a break for a few minutes.

It was a very girlfriendy thing to do. Bringing him pizza.

She wasn't his girlfriend. He'd never expressed any interest in calling her his girlfriend. And she didn't want to call him her boyfriend, either, she reminded herself. They were fuck buddies. Friends with benefits. Things like that.

But she had a whole pizza. And friends with benefits was still friends, right? Friends did nice things for each other, besides orgasms.

When the driver saw her coming, he started to undo the insulated sleeve.

She held up her hand. "Wait a minute." One look outside told her while it had stopped actually raining, outside was still grey and soggy-looking. "Do you go here?"

"Yyyeah," he said slowly.

"Do you know where the Engineering building is?"

He gave her a long-suffering look.

She tried out her smile. Cisco said she should smile more, when she was trying to be friendly. "Please? I'll pay extra."

It must not have looked too much like a death rictus, or he really needed to pay off his bills, because he sighed, zipped up the sleeve, and said, "What the hell, it's my last delivery."

He even allowed her to ride in the front seat of his pizza-smelling car to the Engineering building. Which was nice, though she suspected it was because he didn't want to wait around there for her to walk. She tried practicing small talk. "Do you like your job?"

"No," he said, and that was that.

At the Engineering building, she tipped him generously, as promised, and tried smiling again. He actually sort of grimaced at her (maybe a smile in return?) before squealing off.

She was looking at the door, trying to figure out how to balance the unwieldy pizza box and open it at the same time, where somebody got it from the inside. She started to say "Thank - " and realized who it was.

"Holy shit," Ronnie Raymond said. "A gorgeous woman bringing pizza. It's my fairy tale."

She clutched the pizza and said stupidly, "It's not for you."

He pressed his hand to his heart. "Who's it for?"

"Cisco Ramon, excuse me - " She looked up and down the hall.

"He's right down here." Ronnie gestured. "I should say we're right down here. I'm part of his group. I was just going out to get some chow because the little prick who changed the meeting didn't give Cisco any time to get dinner. But, clearly, you've got that covered. So, we know each other, right?"

"Uh - "

"Freshman Comp? Last year? I keep thinking of adjectives when I look at you somehow. You know, like, gracefully, beautifully, adorably . . . "

"I think you'll find those are adverbs," she said. Was this flirting? Was he flirting with her? On purpose?

He laughed. "That's why I got a C in Freshman Comp." He loped ahead of her and opened the door to a classroom. "Hey, Cisco, man, you didn't mention you had your own personal pizza delivery service."

Cisco glanced up. "What?" He looked tired and annoyed, his hair all disordered, with a pen tangled behind his ear. "Dude, I told you, I don't need - " Then he saw her. He blinked, then smiled. "Hey."

It was easy to smile back at him. She tilted the pizza box a little. "So, I know you had to change our, um, our tutoring session, but it was already on its way. I'd rather you ate it then the people at Thawne."

"Yeah, they're assholes. Thanks, Caitlin, wow." He took the box out of her hands and set it on a table. "Hey, you guys can have some."

"I'm vegetarian," said a thin-faced boy who looked like the unholy love child of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. His lip curled, as if he was personally insulted by the presence of meat.

"Woop-de-doo," Caitlin said coolly, taking her own slice and edging aside so Ronnie could swoop in. "All you had to say was no, thank you."

Cisco rolled his eyes at her, and then blinked as she kept scooting toward the door. "That's it? You're dropping the pizza and running?"

"Well - I - you're busy."

"It's fine. We'll take a break from - " Cisco looked over his shoulder at the whiteboard, covered with scrawls, and made a face. "Our final project."

She looked away from the fourth member of the group, a boy with over-gelled hair who leered at her through his pizza. "So, what is your project?"

"Hell if we know," Cisco said. "That's what we're fighting about."

Ronnie swallowed his mouthful of pizza. "We have to provide an example of an engineering feat and how it could be achieved, including all the relevant forces and calculations."

She kept her eyes fixed on the pizza box. "Like what? A bridge, or something?"

"Totally pedestrian," Cisco said. "We want something way better. Like . . . putting Professor Wells' car on the roof."

"Who's Professor Wells?" Ronnie asked.

Cisco said, "This total dicksmack of a human anatomy prof."

"You're taking anatomy, Ramon?" the leering boy said. He made it sound dirty.

"I'm taking anatomy," Caitlin said, shooting him a cold look. He wilted. She turned back to Cisco. "And he makes my life difficult, it's true, but I don't think he deserves to have his car put on the roof."

"Anybody who gives a major test on the second week of term deserves to have their car put on the roof, even theoretically." Cisco spun on his stool, considering the whiteboard. "No, but seriously, that'd be pretty fucking awesome. Right?" He let the stool carry him back around. "Right? You in, guys?"

The scornful boy sighed. "Juvenile," he muttered.

"I dig it," the leering boy said.

"You're outvoted, Rathaway," Ronnie said. "Pizza _and_ an end to conflict. You're amazing, Caitlin."

She mumbled something and bit into her pizza.

* * *

After she finished eating, Caitlin gave Cisco a significant look. "Before I go, I need to talk you about rescheduling the - um - "

"Right!" he said. "The tutoring. Okay."

He walked out with her, chewing on his last crust. "Hey, I don't actually know when we'll be done tonight. It'll go faster now we have an idea, but - anytime I shouldn't knock on your door?"

She didn't seem to hear him. "Why didn't you tell me Ronnie Raymond was in your group?"

"Ronnie? Probably because I was too busy bitching about Rathaway and Walker. Why? Do you know him? He's a pretty cool guy."

She twisted her fingers together. "We were in a class last year - no, it doesn't matter. Yes. He is nice."

He stared at her, remembering a conversation they'd had the night they'd first slept together. "Caitlin? Is Ronnie the guy you're getting quiet and awkward around right now?"

She darted him a sideways glance and bit her lip.

Something in Cisco's chest, right above his heart, knotted tight for a moment.

"Anyway," she said. "Never mind. It doesn't matter. That's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

 _You brought it up,_ he thought.

She looked around, then pulled down the neckline of her sweater, showing her bra strap and a little triangle of fabric. "Here."

"What?" He looked. "Did I leave a mark? I'm sorry."

Her face fell. She tugged her sweater back into place. "No."

"Uh - ?" He put something together, and pulled her sweater aside again. He ran his finger down the little stripe of greenish bluish satin exposed. "Hey. Is that new or something?"

The smile told him he was right. He smiled back at her. "For me?"

"I just got it today. Do you like it? I mean, I know you can't see much of it - "

He leaned in and whispered, "I'd only like it better if it were on my floor."

She grinned so wide that her dimples popped out. "Later," she said, and turned to go.

"Hey," he called after her. "Hey, you okay? It's cold. You want my hoodie?"

She waved. "I'll walk fast!"

"Text me when you're back okay!" he yelled. He watched until she'd disappeared around the brightly-lit curve. It was all brightly lit, the whole way back. Plus it was Caitlin. She'd probably eviscerate any potential rapist with her room key and choice words.

When he got back into the lab, Walker immediately said, "What kind of _tutoring_ are you giving her?"

"She's tutoring me," Cisco said coolly. "European History. Helping my dumb ass not fail a stupid gen ed."

"Tell me you're hitting that."

"Be a little grosser, I know you can do it if you try." Cisco picked up his calculator and his notes and started looking at the equations Rathaway was putting on the board.

"Bet she's a freak," Walker said. "Is she a freak?"

"If we're all done talking about some _girl,"_ Rathaway said, "we can get started on this puerile idea of yours, Ramon."

Two hours later, they were done, or anyway, Cisco's patience was done, and they cleared out. Ronnie walked with Cisco, both of them bitching about who they'd been saddled with for the other half of their group.

Cisco liked Ronnie, unfortunately. He was a cool guy, willing to pull his share, friendly and not fratty in spite of being in a frat. He really wanted to hate him right now, but he couldn't, exactly. Not just because Caitlin had gotten all blushy and shy when saying his name.

So far as he knew, she'd never gotten blushy when saying Cisco's name.

Ronnie said, "So, not to sound like Walker."

"Please don't."

He laughed. "But really. Are you and Caitlin, like, a thing?"

In his pockets, Cisco's hands balled into fists. He wanted to say, _kind of._ He really fucking did. "Just friends," he said, hoping he didn't sound like he was choking on it. Maybe if he said it with a particular inflection? Friends who've seen each other naked? Friends who make each other come, a lot? "Pretty good friends."

"That's awesome."

"Mmm."

"You think you could give me your friend's number?"

Cisco tripped on thin air. "What?"

Ronnie stopped and waited for him to pretend to tie his shoe. "Dude. That? Was the longest conversation I've ever had with her and I've been trying for a year."

Cisco lifted his head and stared up at him. The glare of the streetlight behind his head became a halo. Like he needed any help looking like a young Greek god.

"Clearly you're a catalyst here," he continued. "So, come on. Can I get her number?"

Cisco got to his feet and stuck his hand in his pocket. "Oh, wow," he said a tad dramatically. "Damn. My battery just died."

"Okay, so - tomorrow?"

"You know what? She's pretty cool really. Ask her yourself. You don't need me." Fuck. He hated himself. Why was he doing this? Why? Why didn't he just say, _you know what, man, she's not interested in you. She's got somebody._

But then Caitlin would keep thinking that nobody had ever noticed her and that was so not true it made him sick.

Ronnie rubbed a hand over his buzz cut. "You think she'd give it to me?"

"Hell, worst she can say is no." _Say no,_ he mentally begged Caitlin. _Say no._

"Yeah . . . yeah, you're right."

They kept walking, and Cisco decided that he'd been wrong. He could totally hate Ronnie Raymond.

He rubbed his chest. It was doing that weird knotting-up thing again.


	12. . . . Felt So Shut Out

_December_

At the familiar knock, Cisco tossed everything in the fridge all jumbled up and shoved it closed. He bounded across the room and yanked his door open. "Hey," he said, super cool. Uber cool. Icy cool.

"Hi," she said in the same kind of voice.

"How was your Thanksgiving?"

"Good, yours?"

"Yeah, pretty good. Wanna come in?"

"Sure." She strolled in, la-di-da, whatever.

The minute the door closed behind her, she whirled and leapt into his arms. He was ready for her, so he didn't land on his butt. They kissed hungrily, biting, licking, giggling into each other's mouths. He picked her up and managed to get them to the big chair in the corner. They fell into it, their foreheads knocking together.

"Ow," she said into his mouth, and laughed harder.

He pulled away. "Aww. Sorry. You okay?"

"Mhm." She kissed his forehead, then his nose, then his ear, and snuggled into his arms. "Hi."

He rested his chin on top of her head. "Hey."

Wow. Four days of no Caitlin in his arms had been longer than he'd thought.

"So," she said. "Good break?"

"Yep. I hung out with my cousins, helped my pop build some shit. My mama sent leftovers."

"Does she think you're starving to death at school?"

"No, but she does think my taste buds are dying of boredom."

"Why does she think that?"

"Because I'm always complaining how my taste buds are dying of boredom."

She laughed, rolling her head on his shoulder to look up at him. "I'd like to taste your mama's leftovers."

"Really? Awesome. Because I'd like to feed them to you." He kissed her and thought about confiding that his brother had actually talked to him this trip. Like, a little. He hadn't said anything like _I'm sorry_ or _I was a moron_ , but they'd talked about football without fighting for, like, twenty minutes and their mami had beamed at them from her spot on the couch, when she wasn't yelling abuse in Spanish at the refs.

But that would force him into this whole explanation, so he just said, "What'd you do?"

She pulled out of his arms and for a moment, he thought he'd stepped in it. She hadn't been looking forward to Thanksgiving break for some reason.

But she danced toward the door, and the purple bag she'd dropped at some point. "I went toy shopping."

"Toys 'r' Us?" he asked, following her.

She shook her head, biting her lower lip and wiggling like a cat who was about to pounce on a catnip mouse. "Have a look."

He did, and raised his brows. "Hooo. Online?"

"In a store. A real store. I went in one. My sister took me."

"Best. Sister. Ever." He retrieved a box and studied it with a mixture of bafflement and arousal. "What does this do?"

She peered at it. "I have no idea." She plucked it out of his fingers. "Let's find out."

* * *

Cisco rolled off Caitlin and flopped on his back. _"I like that toy."_

"Unnnnnhhh," she said, agreement without actual words or possibly brain cells being involved. Every inch of her tingled with pleasure.

When she could move again, she rolled to her side and snuggled into Cisco, listening to the familiar thud of his heart, slowing down. His arms came around her and he nuzzled her hair. "So far I'm impressed with your toy shopping."

She smiled into his chest, then lifted her head, frowning at the intermittent buzzing. "Did you leave it on?"

"If I'd left it on, I'd be dead due to acute and persistent coming-my-brains-out."

"Oh! It's my phone." She sat up and sifted through the jumble of their clothes, draped every which way across the end of the bed.

He sat up, too, resting his chin on her shoulder. "So, who is it? Anyone special?"

"Iris. Oh. Oh my god." She grabbed her clothes. "She says she and Barry are ten minutes away and do I want to get dinner with you guys and oh, I have to get back to my room - "

He grabbed her around the waist. "Waiiiiit."

"What."

"Text her back, say, sure thing, sounds great, I'll hang with Cisco until you get here."

Caitlin's breathing slowed. "Oh. That makes sense."

"Yep."

"I mean, I still have to put my clothes on."

His thumbs stroked her ribs. "You do?"

"Yesssss." But she gave him a kiss. "And my hair's a mess."

"Your hair's great. Sexy. Windblown."

"Hurricane blown."

"It's the newest thing. Didn't you watch Fashion Week?"

She tossed his clothes at him, gave him another kiss, and climbed out of bed.

He found a clip she'd left under his bed before the break, so by the time Barry's key turned in the lock, she looked completely presentable and not at all like she'd been naked and moaning not so long ago. She and Cisco were lounging several feet apart, discussing their finals schedule.

Barry stuck his head in and wrinkled his nose. "Overdid the Febreze, didn't you?"

"Trust me, you didn't want to smell it before he did," Caitlin said in her primmest voice. Which was true. The room had smelled like two people had been going at it for nearly an hour. But she hoped to imply something different to Barry.

Cisco picked it up and shrugged. "I shouldn't've gotten the beef broccoli on the road, I know better now."

"Gross," Iris said, giving Caitlin a hug. "Hi! You look great. Hungry?"

"Starved." They traipsed off down the hall, chatting about break.

Behind them, Caitlin heard Barry mutter, "Since when are you and Caitlin such awesome friends?"

"Awhile now," Cisco said easily. "You've just been lost in the black hole of young love. Where're we going?"

* * *

Barry was around a little more, with finals coming up and the first blazing rush of love simmering down. He still spent most of his time with Iris, but Cisco actually saw his roommate once every couple of days now. Iris came and hung out in the room too, but they were polite enough not to make out too much while he was around.

One day Iris knocked and he let her in. "Hi," she said. "You mind if I use your window?"

"Sure thing. For?"

"Thinking." She opened up her backpack and retrieved a thick stack of printed sheets, and started taping them up. "I just spent an hour printing all these out. I haven't even read some of them. This is how I make connections, this right here."

"It looks like a murder board," Cisco said, pulling the armchair out from the window nook to make room. "From cop shows."

She shrugged. "My dad's a cop. I guess I got it from him."

He flopped into the chair, since it was there. "Where's Bare?"

"Getting brownies."

"Part of the thinking process?"

"Critical," she said, and he laughed.

"What's the project?"

"I have to pick a national scandal and make a presentation about the role that traditional and social media played. It's my final. Oh, shit - " She'd dropped the folder.

"I got it," he said, handing her a fistful of papers and scooping the rest back into a pile, which he held for her. "You've got two weeks yet," he said idly, flipping through the stack. Headlines like _McDonnell's Secret Life_ and _Dirty Little Secret_ blared out at him. It rang a distant bell. "Hey, I know this guy. The one with the girlfriend and the secret kids, when he was running for president all family values and shit. Didn't Barry have to do a paper on him?"

"Yes, that's where I got the idea to use it for my final. It's a monster project. It's worth some unholy percentage of my grade. I'm just happy I got this topic. It's going to be so good. Just kickass. I'm just not looking forward to all the gross stuff on social. I mean, it'll be good stuff for my presentation, but, ew."

"How do you know it's gross if you haven't seen it?"

"Something like this, social is always disgusting. Always. More, please?"

He handed her another stack of papers and found himself looking at a picture of two teenage girls. The older one, with glasses and a blond ponytail, glared at the camera. The younger one had her face turned away, her dark reddish hair sweeping across her shoulders. They followed a dazed-looking blond woman into a hotel.

"Iris," he said. "Who is this?"

"Oh, that's Anna Smoak and her two daughters."

"McDonnell's kids, right?"

"Yep. Not that he ever admitted that part."

"What were their names?" He couldn't stop staring at the hunch of the younger girl's shoulders and the stiffness of her mouth.

He knew those shoulders.

He knew that mouth.

They were younger and little and grainy in the photo, but -

"Um, hang on. I know this - Felicity and Caitlin Smoak."

"Caitlin?" Cisco lifted his head. "Like, our friend Caitlin?"

Iris looked over her shoulder at him. He held up the paper.

"It can't be," she said. "It's got to be a coincidence."

He handed her the picture. She stared at it, then riffled through her own stack of papers and stared at another picture.

He held his hand up for it and she passed it to him.

This was a better shot, less grainy, bigger, and it caught more of her face. He swallowed. _Caitlin._

"It's even spelled the same way."

Iris shook her head. "It - it's got to be a coincidence," she said again.

He held up the picture. "This is one hell of a coincidence."

Barry came in. "Hey, babe, I had to fight off a football player for this brownie, but I got it!"

"Thanks," she said absently, taking it.

"Thanks? Nice." He kissed her anyway. "What are you guys looking at?"

Iris showed him. "We're starting to think this is Caitlin. You know, our friend Caitlin? Across the hall?"

Barry's shoulders went stiff for a moment, but he laughed and shook his head. "No, it's not." He leaned his hip on the windowsill next to Iris and unwrapped the brownie, breaking off a corner and handing it to her.

"No, look at it, dude," Cisco said. "Here. Look at this one."

Barry put his arms around Iris's waist and propped his chin on her shoulder. "That girl's like fourteen, you guys."

Iris said, "Uh-huh, and this happened five years ago."

"Mmmm. I don't see it."

"Come on, man," Cisco said. "Sure, she's younger, but - little Caitlin. Baby Caitlin. Right? You don't see it?"

"No." Barry snorted. "You always think people look like people."

Iris craned her neck to squint at him. "What are people supposed to look like, tuna sandwiches?"

Barry laughed. "No, no, Cisco is always like, 'that guy looks like my cousin' or 'that chick looks like this movie star.' Always."

Cisco said, "No, but it _does_."

"So, maybe she's a distant cousin. Doppelganger. Double from an alternate universe. So what? Why does it matter?"

"Because she - " Iris put her hand over her mouth, looking at the article. "If it's her, she went through this. Oh, my god. The horrible things they said about her mom - and they even said things about her sister and her. They were kids. Their dad still hasn't even admitted he's their dad. Poor Caitlin. Oh, my god."

"Or maybe," Barry said, pulling it out of her hands. "It's a wacky coincidence and you don't need to ever mention it to her at all, ever, in any way."

They stared at him.

"Dude - ?" Cisco said.

Red crawled up Barry's ears.

"You do think it's her," Iris said. "Bartholomew Henry Allen, why the hell are you trying to gaslight us?"

"I - " He rubbed the back of his neck. "Look, you guys, yes. I do think it's her, and I've thought that ever since I did the paper on McDonnell, but - "

"I knew it! Why are you pretending?"

"Because! Because she changed her last name. Because she moved fifteen hundred miles away from DC to go to school, and because even her sister, who kept the name Smoak, is ten hours away. Because _none of us knew_. Because it's her business and we need to stay out of it."

"But - " Iris said. "She should know that - "

"What? That we know something she didn't want us to know? That she didn't want anyone to know? That she so clearly wanted to leave behind?"

Cisco looked down at the picture again, touching Caitlin's young, printed face.

Barry cupped Iris's face in his big hand. "Baby," he said softly. "I know you just want to be her friend and let her know that you're here for her. But please, please, please leave it alone."

Iris shook her head. "I -"

"Look, sweetie. There are three people on this campus who know about - " He swallowed. "About my mom. Cisco knows because he's my best friend and has been since we were twelve. The counselor at campus health knows because I was having panic attacks last year. And you - honey, you know because I wanted you to know everything about me. The good and the bad. But nobody else. Nobody. If Caitlin wanted us to know about her dad, she would've told us, okay? Let her be."

Iris dropped her head, biting her lip. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Yeah. Oh! Oh, God. I need to email my professor. I need to change my topic. I can't do this. I - " She yanked a paper off the window, tearing it in half. "Oh my god, what if someone else does it?"

"You said everybody had picked theirs."

"Yeah. They did. Okay. So."

"It's okay, we'll find another topic. You'll talk your prof into it. It'll be fine." Barry stood up to help her pull down papers, and kissed her temple. "It'll be fine."


	13. . . . Wanted More Than What I Had

Cisco knew it was a terrible idea. He tried to talk himself out of it, repeating what Barry had said over and over again. It was Caitlin's business. If she'd wanted him to know she would have told him. She had a right to privacy.

But he found himself sorting through the papers that Iris and Barry left in the trash anyway. Iris, ever thorough, had printed out not only the articles but the comment sections, too.

When he was done, he felt like he'd taken a swim in a sewage dump. The articles had been slyly speculative about Caitlin's mom, and that had been bad enough, but the comment sections had been worse. People had bemoaned the poor Senator's ruined life and talked about Caitlin and her mom and her sister like they were leeches and tramps, like they'd done it deliberately. Being born. Existing.

And if that had been bad, the single page of the Twitter hashtag, circa five years ago, was an ocean of filth.

He tore the papers to shreds, wishing he could do the same to the people on the other end of those Twitter handles. "She was fourteen," he snarled at the men who'd openly discussed what they wanted to do to Caitlin and her big sister and her mom, horrible things that he couldn't believe even a grown-up human woman would want. _"Fourteen!"_

But the worst, somehow, was a transcript from a press conference just after the rumors started to blossom.

_Senator, can you respond to the allegations of an ongoing illicit affair between yourself and political analyst Anna Smoak?_

_(laughter) Those are absurd allegations, as anybody who ever knew me could tell you. I consider Ms. Smoak a colleague and friend. Nothing more._

He read it over and over again, feeling his stomach churn, feeling his chest knot.

He dumped every scrap of paper into his trash can, even picking up the tiniest shreds that looked like confetti. He didn't want to share a room with any of that. He shoved it down as far as it would go, until the plastic cracked. Then he picked it up and took it out to the dumpster and threw the whole thing in. They could take it out of his security deposit.

"Cisco!"

He spun. "Hi. Just taking out the trash."

"It's freezing out here." She fished her key out of her pocket and opened the side door, then held it open. "Why don't you have your coat?"

"I was just running out here for a moment. Anyway, you don't have any gloves."

She made a face. "I lost one again." She glanced around as usual before unlocking her room door. "You want to come in?"

He followed her in, and she'd barely set down her backpack and her bags down before he'd caught her by the arms and was holding her tight, kissing her deeply.

"Cisco," she mumbled, pushing at his chest. "Cisco!"

"Sorry," he said, letting her go.

She put her arms around him. "You're shivering. You should've taken your coat."

That wasn't why he was shaking. But he said, "Yeah, probably," and hugged her back, trying not to hold her too tight. He wanted to fold her up in his arms and tell her nobody would ever be that disgusting about her ever again.

But he wasn't supposed to know.

"What?" she asked him.

"Nothing, I -" He touched her hair, brushing it out of her eyes. "I don't know."

"You're being weird."

He forced a smile. "I guess I'm - "

"A little horny?" she teased him.

His stomach flipped over. "No, I'm - I don't know. I'm feeling weird." He glanced down at the bag on her desk. "What'd you get?"

"Sweet and sour chicken. Do you want to share? They always give you so much."

"Thanks," he said, kissing her. "But I'm not actually that hungry right now. I'll hang out while you eat."

"You're not hungry?" She felt his forehead. "Are you getting sick? Something's going around."

"No, I just ate lunch late. I'm fine."

They watched a TV show  about superheroes while she ate. He felt better after pointing out the terribleness of the gadget design. "Seriously," he said. "That dude's supposed to be a genius. Like, are they even trying with thermodynamics there?"

"It's a TV show," she laughed, burrowing back into his arms. He'd held onto her throughout the episode, unwilling to let her go.

"What happened to your constant refrain of 'they should get the science right'?"

"It's a TV show about a guy who can stretch himself like taffy, Cisco, I'm inclined to give the science a liiiiitle bit of a pass." She twisted around, kissing his neck. Her hands played with the hem of his shirt. "Anyway, you were the one who got me hooked."

He put his hand in her hair and kissed her again, long and deep. She answered it until they both had to catch their breath.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, we haven't done anything off your list for a while. Wanna pick something?"

"Sure."

They looked at her list. "Ooo," he said. "I've got that. Whipped cream."

"You just randomly have whipped cream handy?"

"Why would I not?"

"Silly question." She looked around her. "Hmm. Well. I am doing laundry tomorrow. Okay. Since you've got the whipped cream anyway."

"Awesome. Be right back." He hopped up and ran across the hall. As he dug in his fridge, it all hit him again and he had to sit down on the floor, resting his head against the chilly shelf. He found himself staring at the old picture of fourteen-year-old Caitlin, her sweet, round baby face tight, her eyes brittle with unhappiness. He hadn't been able to tear that one up, and it had fallen under his desk. His heart turned over.

God, if he felt like this after just looking at the articles, what had it felt like to live it?

He swallowed a few times and stuck one whipped cream can in each pants pocket and one in the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie.

She'd put an extra sheet over her blankets and was climbing back down her ladder when he walked back. She blinked at him, one foot on the floor. "You seriously had three cans of whipped cream handy."

She smiled at him, her face soft and her eyes bright with laughter, and he thought, _That's the way you should always look._

"Again," he said. "Why would I not?" He tilted his head back and sprayed whipped cream directly into his mouth until it was full, then grabbed her and kissed her over her protests. She was laughing too hard to get away.

He kept charge of the cans, spraying whipped cream in every spot he could think of and licking it away until her giggles turned to moans and sighs and back to giggles again. He was glad he'd picked that. It was an excellent excuse to kiss every inch of her body.

* * *

Cisco knocked on Caitlin's door. "Hey, you ready? C'mon!"

"What's the rush?" she asked, opening her door and propping it open with her anatomy textbook so he could lean against the jamb. "Doesn't the river fest go until eleven?"

"Last year, they ran out of hot chocolate before nine o'clock. Trust me, it was a bloodbath."

"Well, if they learned anything from last year, they'll have plenty," she said, sitting down to put on her boots.

"If you were running it, they would, but you're not. So come on."

She gave a harrumph, like a little old man, and he grinned. She was so freaking cute sometimes.

"Hey," Barry said, coming up behind them. "Ready, Caitlin?"

"Almost," she said, putting her coat on and zipping it up. "Where's Iris?"

"She's meeting us at the bell tower. In fact, she texted me and she just left her place, so if we go now, we'll get there at the same time."

"See?" Cisco said to her. "So hurry up. Won't you feel bad if Barry has to miss a single minute of Iris's lips?"

She sent him a deadpan look. "Devastated." She felt around in her pockets and made an annoyed noise, then started opening drawers.

"What now?"

"I can't find any - "

He put his hand in his pocket and held out a pair of gloves.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. "That. Yes. Okay. I'm ready." She grabbed her purse, put the gloves on, and pulled her door shut behind her. "Let's go."

They went out into the cold, Cisco telling her all about the various entertainments at the river festival - booths from the various clubs and organizations, games, rides, food. Lots of food, and mostly it was sticky or sweet or salty or just plain unhealthy as fuck, so basically all of Cisco's favorite food groups. The river festival was CCU's last event before finals. It was always cold and this year it had actually snowed so it was supposed to be extra good.

Something was up with Barry, though. His eyes were wide and every time he looked at Cisco, he broke out in a weird grin.

Caitlin's phone rang, and she glanced at the screen. "Oh, it's my sister." She answered the call. "Hey. What's going on?"

Barry grabbed Cisco's arm and yanked, and Cisco stumbled backward a step. "Dude!" he protested.

"Duuuude!" Barry said, eyes bright. "Why didn't you tell me?" He was practically dancing.

"I did tell you," Cisco said. "Don't you remember? Pee before you leave because otherwise you'll freeze your nards in the Porta-Potties."

"Not that, fool. About you and Caitlin."

"What about us?"

"Why didn't you tell me you were dating?"

His mouth went suddenly dry. "Dating - ? What? Are you hallucinating?" He darted a look at Caitlin, but she was several steps ahead, murmuring into her phone. "We're not dating. Where did your weirdo brain come up with that?"

Barry stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a light purple knitted ring with a rhinestone flower on it.

Cisco looked at it critically. "Not your color, man."

"No! It's for Iris. In case she forgot one and her ears are cold."

"I'm still lost."

"You had a pair of gloves for Caitlin." Barry flapped the purple thing. "That's the kind of thing you do for your girl, man."

"It's also the kind of thing you do when she's taking for-damn-ever to get ready and you've got a pair of gloves in your pocket and you just wanna go already."

"I don't believe they were yours. They're white and sparkly and sort of furry at the bottom."

"Dude, are you seriously policing my self-expression?"

"Also they fit her perfectly and your hands are like twice the size of hers."

"Okay, fine, they're hers. She left them in our room the other day so I grabbed them. She leaves gloves everywhere. She's got like twelve orphan gloves in a plastic bag in her wardrobe."

"And you know that because - ?"

"We're friends. We hang."

"Ffffffrrrrrrriiiiiiiennnnnds," Barry drawled. "And what do you two friendly people do together?"

Cisco closed his eyes. Barry knew. The asshole. "Okay," he muttered. "Okay, okay, fine. All right. You got me. We're sleeping together."

He expected Barry to do a triumphant little dance, but for some reason, he looked both dismayed and puzzled. "Wha - That's it?"

"Yeah. It's like a friends with benefits thing."

"Are you sure?"

"Am I sure that I regularly get laid? Uh, pretty sure, yeah."

"No, I mean - " Barry glanced at her back. "Is that really all it is? Because you like her, man. You really like her."

"I like all my friends, benefits or not."

"Okay, but - "

Cisco scowled at him. "You're so in love you think everyone else is too. Friends with benefits is all it is, Bare, don't go writing us a theme song."

"Okay," Barry said. "All right."

They tromped along in silence for awhile, Caitlin's voice carrying back to them on the chilly wind. A few snowflakes swirled by.

"Hey, uh," Cisco said.

"Mmm?"

"Can you, um, not tell people? That we're - that we've got a thing?"

"I'll cancel the skywriter."

"It's just, she's private." He sank his voice even lower. "For obvious reasons. And that's, like, a thing that we agreed on. That nobody would know."

Barry swallowed. "Okay. I get the privacy thing. I guess. But, dude, Iris is smart as hell. I mean, I can keep it a secret from her, but she already thinks you guys might be a thing. She's the one who got me thinking maybe."

"Okay, fine. Tell Iris. But tell her not to say anything."

"Sure. Yeah. Whatever you want."

They'd come up on the plaza with the bell tower now. It was cluttered with couples, every last one of them kissing like the end of a romcom.

There were always couples making out here, because of the campus myth that anyone who kissed under the bell tower would stay together forever. But it was especially crowded tonight. Apparently, the bell-tower mojo was supposed to be extra potent during the river fest.

Or maybe everyone just wanted a great excuse to mack on their baes in public for hours on end.

"Iris!" Barry called out, and she came around from the other side.

"Hi!" she squealed, and ran into his arms. They started kissing too.

"Ay dios mio," Cisco mumbled under his breath. "This could be awhile," he said to Caitlin, who was just ending her conversation.

"It's fine," she said, looking at the couples all around them.

He smiled tightly and nodded at a couple who'd just peeled their lips apart and, still mostly wrapped around each other, were walking off toward the river. "Hey Sara. Hey, Nyssa."

"Hi, Cisco," Sara said. "Hi, Caitlin." Her eyes moved back and forth between them, as if she was trying to figure out why they weren't kissing, too.

"Hi," Caitlin said. "How are you doing?"

"Pretty good, if we can get there in time to open the booth. Someone - " She elbowed her girlfriend. " - had to stop here first."

"I just want to make sure we're together forever," Nyssa said, nuzzling her temple.

"Hey, I'm not complaining," Sara said, and grabbed Nyssa's butt. Nyssa squealed and grabbed her hand, pulling her along down the path. Sara just had time to wave and yell, "See you guys there!"

"What's the GSA's booth?" Caitlin asked.

Cisco wasn't working it because his volunteer hours were long finished. But he'd helped plan it. "Kissing booth. Donate five bucks to the teen shelter and you can pick any gender you wanna kiss."

"That's nice."

"Or you can just donate five bucks and get a little bag of Hershey kisses, that's fine too."

"Was that your idea?"

"Yeah."

"Somehow that sounded like you."

"Yeah, well, last year there were some people who, it was kinda weird for them to be like, 'I wanna give you money but I don't want to kiss anybody' and some people felt bad and some people had honeys already, so this is, like, an out that saves everybody's pride and nobody who's paired up has to - "

 _Stop it,_ he ordered himself fiercely. _Stop babbling. Shut up._

He obeyed himself with one last, "Yeah, well, you get the idea."

She hugged herself, tucking her gloved fingers into the crooks of her elbows, looking around with an expression on her face that he couldn't exactly read. Barry and Iris were still at it.

Before Cisco knew what he was doing, he'd pulled his hand out of his pocket and was reaching for hers.

To do what?

To weave his fingers through hers? To tug her into his arms? To kiss her now, here, under the bell tower, for everyone to see?

She'd probably push him away.

He put his hand back in his pocket.

* * *

The festival was nice - games and food and rides, all very carnival atmosphere. Caitlin hadn't gone the year before, but she was glad Cisco had talked her into it.

It was also very coupley. Lots of hand holding and snuggling over hot chocolate and nuzzly kisses in the shadows. It wasn't as bad as the bell tower, but then she couldn't imagine what would be. It had been so horribly awkward, standing there in the middle of all those couples, with Cisco shuffling his feet at her side.

What would he have done if she'd turned to him and kissed him right there? Would he have smiled at her and pulled her close?

He probably would have made a joke out of it.

The thought made her feel hollow in strange places - her stomach, her chest - and uncomfortably full in others - her throat, the corners of her eyes.

She swallowed and focused on her conversation with Felicity. Nothing yet, she'd reported. No mumbles in the media. Nobody seemed to have noticed that Gordon McDonnell and his wife had separated.

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe nobody would ever notice. Maybe nobody cared anymore.

"Caaaaaaaitlin," Cisco said, waving a hand in front of her eyes. "What's up? You cold?"

"Hmm?" She blinked at him. "No. Where'd Barry and Iris go?"

"Eh, we lost 'em about ten minutes ago. They stopped to make out again. Want some cider?"

Her eyes went to a couple warming their hands on the same cup. "No."

"Check out the games. I'll win you a prize with a feat of strength and/or cunning. Preferences?"

"It's okay."

"Hey." He stepped into her path, forcing her to stop. "Everything all right?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't know, you're distracted tonight." His nose and cheeks were red and the ends of his hair caught the wind, fluttering it against his jaw. His eyes were kind. His eyes were always kind. "You, uh, you know you can tell me anything. Right?"

She looked away. "That's what friends are for, aren't they?"

"Right, sure. So?"

She manufactured a smile. "Just finals."

He started to say something, then looked away. "So how hellish is Wells' final going to be?" he asked as they started walking again.

"Seventh circle, probably."

"Damn."

Friends with benefits. It was a very normal kind of arrangement. Not something Caitlin would have thought of herself being involved in three months ago. Before she'd met Cisco.

She breathed carefully, thinking, _You've come this far. You have a friend. You have friends. Multiple. One of them includes benefits. Isn't it enough? Can't you be happy with it?_

"You know what, I think I'll take you up on that offer," she announced suddenly. "Of demonstrating a feat of strength and/or cunning."

He made a buzzer sound with his lips. "Sorry, ma'am, that offer closed thirty seconds ago."

"Oh, it did."

"It did. In fact, now you have to perform the feat of strength and/or cunning."

"Me?"

"Yep. I require a giant-ass teddy bear and you're gonna get it for me." He snaked a hand around her waist and steered her toward the carnival games.

"They're rigged," she told him. "They're always rigged."

"But you know that, and knowledge is power. I will settle for a medium-ass teddy bear if absolutely necessary."

* * *

"Hey, so," he said later that night, while she was curled into his side all soft and warm. "I have to tell you something."

She stirred. "What's that?"

"Barry figured it out."

"Figured - ?"

"You know. That you and me, that we're doing it."

She was silent.

"I mean, I could have denied it or whatever but he knows me too well. I told him to keep quiet, so - come on, let me have it."

He held his breath, waiting for her to say, _That's okay. That's perfect. I'm glad Barry knows. I want everybody to know. I want to kiss you under the bell tower so this whole campus knows we're together, especially Ronnie Raymond -_

"It's fine," she said.

"You know how I feel about 'fine,'" he said, trying to make his voice light and teasing.

She propped herself up to look at him. In the darkness, without his glasses, her face was a blurry pale oval. "No, it's really fine. I think Iris has figured it out too. If this was a couple of months ago ago, I would be mad, I'll admit, but I know them. It's all right."

He played with the ends of her hair. "It's not like they're gonna go to the tabloids or something," he said. "The sordid life of a regular college student."

She gave a little hmmmm and laid back down. He kissed her shoulder blade, thinking, _Tell me. Tell me all of it. Your mom and your dad and - Tell me. Let me hug you and say that it totally sucked and tell you it won't ever happen again. Please._

She didn't say anything.

"I told him how it was," he said. "Barry gets it."

"Mhm," she said, sounding far away.

He put his arm around her waist and tucked his foot in between hers. His chest had that knot in it again.


	14. . . . Been Dumped

The party was loud and crowded, but Caitlin had managed to find a quiet corner where she could hear Sara telling stories from the kissing booth at the river fest. There were a lot of them.

". . . okay, so then he does that gross fuckboy thing, like, 'hey baby, I'm cool that you're bi, because that means threesomes!'"

Caitlin almost spit out her drink. "Yuck!"

Sara was giggling madly. "Yesss! And then she says, 'oh baby, that sounds like a great idea,' and then to me, she goes, 'if you're in, of course. Do you know anybody who's willing to be the third? Because I've suddenly decided I'm single.'"

Caitlin laughed into her drink. "Ouch. Wow."

"Yep. I think he stood there blinking for like ten minutes." Sara finished off her drink. "At least he didn't flip out at her. The last boy I dated, I tried to let him down easy, and he called me a lying whore who led him on in front of the whole coffee shop." She rolled her eyes.

"Nyssa's a trade up," Caitlin said.

"True dat." She knocked her cup against Caitlin's.

"So the booth made a lot of money?"

"Really a lot. We kind of worried about whether to do it again, you know, because people already just think of us in terms of the sex that we're having. But whatever, right? It was fun, and people liked it, and they really liked the Hershey kisses."

"That was a good idea. They were delicious."

Sara sent her a sly look. "You know, some people in our booth were really disappointed you went for the candy."

Caitlin felt her face heat. "What?"

"Just sayin'. Can't give you names because confidentiality, but between you and me, some people wouldn't have even charged to kiss you."

"That - um - that's nice of you to say."

"Ah, it's the truth." Sara's face crumpled. "Oh, god, did I make you uncomfortable? I'm sorry. I don't mean to be that girl."

"No, I - I'm just surprised."

"Well, if you ever get over being surprised and feel like a date, you're not going to have to look very far to get one. But! I'll stop. So." Sara plopped her cup down. "Big break plans?"

"I'm spending Hanukkah and New Year's with my sister."

"Woooo, party!"

They chatted about Sara's plans for the break - she was planning on some heavy duty partying with her own big sister. "She's in law school and ohhhh my god, she needs the biggest break of all time. I'm telling you, I'm going to get Laurel laid this Christmas if it's the last thing I do."

"Hey, guys!" Iris wedged herself in next to Caitlin and put her arm around her shoulders in a quick hug.

"Hi!" She hugged Iris back. "How were your finals?"

"Oh, my god, ovvvverrrr," Iris said, drooping on her shoulder for a minute before popping back up with a laugh.

"What about that one huge project? How did that turn out?" Iris had been worried about it, after having to change her topic suddenly for some reason.

"Oh! So good. Cisco hooked me up with this history specialist at the library and she helped me find allllll these crazy sensational articles from about a hundred years ago. Apparently, Warren G. Harding? Kind of a dick."

"Well, that's politics for you," Caitlin said.

"No kidding. What about your finals?"

"Same! Over. I'm not even going to think about school for the next month."

Barry came by with a cup of beer for Iris and she traded him a kiss. "Hey, Caitlin," he said. "Hey, Sara. No Nyssa tonight?"

"Hey, Barry," Sara said. "She went home for break already. I'm very proud of myself. I've only texted her three hundred times since she left."

They all laughed, but Caitlin noticed that Sara laughed loudest, as if she was trying to make fun of her own emotions. It was a long time not to see your girlfriend. The spring semester didn't start for five weeks.

She fiddled with her cup. She'd been trying not to think of that, herself.

"Anyway," Sara said. "Where's Cisco?"

Caitlin was glad Sara had asked so she wouldn't have to.

"Finishing up his last calc final," Barry said, propping himself on the arm of the couch. His legs were so long they reached all the way to the floor even from that height. His eyes flickered toward Caitlin for a moment. "It's taking longer than he thought and it's due at midnight."

Iris hadn't said anything about Cisco to Caitlin, but they hadn't seen much of each other since the river fest. Barry gave her funny looks sometimes, searching and curious, as if he were trying to work something out.

"Awwww, suck!" Sara said, oblivious to the undercurrents. "I hope he makes it. Hey, you'd know. Is Cisco into anybody right now?"

"Ummmm," Barry said, rubbing the back of his neck. His eyes flickered toward Caitlin again. "Ummm, I'm . . . not sure? Really? We haven't talked about it."

"Because I was thinking of introducing him to my sister over break. I'd think they'd really like each other."

Caitlin felt her face get hot again, and her stomach go hollow, the way it was doing more and more these days when she thought about Cisco. She stared into her drink, at the dregs in the bottom.

"Uh, um, sure, that would probably be okay. I mean, Cisco likes. Um. People."

"Yeah, well, my sister's a people," Sara said with a laugh, looking around as if trying to figure out why everything had suddenly gotten so awkward.

"Sara, do you want a refill?" Caitlin asked, getting to her feet. "I'm going to make myself another drink. You want something?"

"Naw, I'm good," Sara said. "Thanks."

"Barry? Iris?"

"Just fine," Iris said, hoisting her mostly-full cup with a bright smile and an anxious look in her eye.

"Okay." Caitlin picked her way through their legs and wove through the party, smiling and saying hi to people that were familiar faces now.

Maybe she should go back, she thought. If Cisco wasn't going to make it. She was leaving for home early in the morning, and she'd really hoped they could have tonight together. With the crushing pressure of studying and finals, all they'd managed over the past week was a hurried quickie in his armchair two days ago, one so rushed he hadn't even taken her shirt off. He'd kissed her deeply when it was over, his fingers combing gently through her hair, but then he'd said, "I've gotta go present for Mardon's class, okay? I can't be late."

"No, no, go," she'd told him, and gone back to her room to clean herself up.

She wanted to take things slow tonight. To kiss him, to laugh, to cuddle, to enjoy him. She felt like they hadn't done enough of that lately. Like there were things running under the surface that neither of them could say. Or would say.

She wished they could go back to the way it started, when he was just laughing and easy and warm, and she'd felt like no topic at all was off the table.

"Hey," said a voice. "Caitlin. Hi."

She looked up to see Ronnie Raymond at the table with all the drinks on it. "Hi," she said, her voice a little high. "Hi. How are you tonight?"

"Pretty good. You?"

"Recovering from finals," she said, like she'd said to everyone who asked.

"Awesome."

She plucked at the lip of her cup and cast around for something to say. "Oh! How was your project? The one you were doing for engineering class, with Cisco?"

"Oh, yeah! We don't have our grade yet, but Mardon laughed his ass off. I think we scored an A."

"That's great."

"Yeah, we're pretty happy with it. Anyway, what're you drinking? Can I top it off for you?"

"Oh, no, I've got it." She picked up the vodka, and the triple sec. "Is there any lemon juice? Sugar?"

He presented them and watched her mix her drink. "Wow. That's pretty awesome. You moonlighting as a bartender?"

"I just, um, took some mixology lessons this semester." She bit her lower lip, and impulsively offered, "What are you drinking? I could mix it for you."

"Oh, well, this is a very manly and sophisticated cocktail I've got here." He scooped some ice into his cup, then picked up the two-liter of Coke and filled it to the brim.

She found herself giggling. Maybe she'd mixed her last drink a little strong. "Oh, I see. Very complex mix of flavors you've got going on."

"Right, right." He laughed. "I drew the short straw tonight. I'm DD'ing for my brothers and sisters."

"Sisters? Like your favorite sorority - ?"

"A-Phi-O's a co-ed frat."

"I didn't know that was a thing."

"Yeah, sure is. Hey, you wanna come out to the patio and meet some of them? They're all pretty awesome, I promise."

She thought about saying no, and then thought about what Cisco would say if he were standing right here. He wouldn't even hesitate. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Sure."

Ronnie's frat brothers and sisters were all very nice, and they all smiled significantly at Ronnie when he introduced her. Caitlin noticed that, and tried not to think about it, and failed.

She drank her drink and chatted with them. One of the girls filled her in on a professor whose class she'd signed up for next semester. "If he ever says to come to his office outside of regular office hours - _don't_. He's a perv. In fact, avoid the regular office hours, too."

"But I've heard it's a really tough class."

"It is," Eliza said. "But there's this whole network of girls, and a few guys, who'll tutor you if you need it."

"Thank you," Caitlin said feelingly, and they traded email addresses.

Barry and Iris drifted through, and Caitlin pulled them into the group. Iris knew one of the other girls, Linda, from her journalism class, and they started post-morteming their final projects.

They talked about break plans and classes for next semester, internships that people were lining up, jobs they were going to over break in order to have enough money for the next semester, and the sad, sad lack of snacks on the patio until Linda said, "Oh my god, _okay,_ I'll go find something! Iris, come with me."

None of it was exactly riveting or meaningful, but it was warm and friendly and Caitlin never would have done this two months ago.

She checked her phone. It was eleven-thirty, and no text from Cisco. She caught Barry's arm and whispered, "Did Cisco text you?"

He shook his head, giving her a kind look before turning back to his intense debate over the value of a forensic science degree.

She finished her drink. "Hey," she said aloud. "I'm actually going to go. I have to get on the road early tomorrow. It was very nice meeting you all."

The group let out a chorus of "yeahs" and "sures" and "you toos."

"About that class," Eliza said. "I really mean it, email me anytime."

"Absolutely. Thank you so much, and I'll be sure to pass it on to the other girls in the class." Caitlin gave a little wave to everyone. "Barry, have a good break, okay?"

He looked up, blinking. "Whuh - ? Oh, yeah, sure."

She smiled at him. "And tell Iris goodbye for me and that we'll talk over break." She got up and went to throw out her cup.

When she turned back, Ronnie was making his way toward her. "Hey, I'd be happy to run you back to your dorm if you want. I'm sober anyway."

She hesitated, but it was a dark, cold walk in high heels, and she didn't want to miss Cisco. "That would be really nice of you. Thank you."

"So, where do you live?'

"Thawne House."

"Right, right, Ramon said you were his neighbor. But, I meant where are you driving back to tomorrow?"

"I'm spending the break with my sister in Starling City."

"Aw, no way! _I_ live in Starling!"

"Really?"

"Well, one of the suburbs. We should totally hang out over break!"

She felt herself blushing. "I'd like that. Yeah."

* * *

Iris and Linda came back with a giant bag of popcorn for the group, and Iris noticed right away that Caitlin and Ronnie were gone. She'd been monitoring that. "Honey, where's Caitlin?" she asked Barry, snuggling down next to him on the couch.

"She just left. She wanted to go home," he said. "She told me to tell you bye."

She gave him a shove. "Baby, didn't you see her shoes? Go drive her!"

"It's fine," Eliza said. "Ronnie's driving her."

One of the other boys said solemnly, "Raymond truly embodies the A-Phi-O spirit of service," and everyone laughed.

Iris said, "Bare - "

Eliza leaned forward and said in a low voice, "Hey. It's really seriously okay. It's awesome that you're concerned for your friend, but I've known Ronnie for years. He's totally into Caitlin, but he's not that kind of guy. She's one hundred and fifty percent safe with him, I promise."

"I - okay, but - " Iris looked at the door, thinking about Ronnie and the soft looks he'd been giving Caitlin, and the shy way Caitlin had looked into her cup every time she caught his eye, and the breathless way she'd laughed at his jokes.

And Cisco, finishing up his calc final at Thawne. Where Ronnie and Caitlin were going right now.

"I'm sure it'll be fine," Barry said, putting his arm around her waist.

She bit her lip. Without charging after Caitlin or spilling the beans on their complicated, secret not-a-relationship, she didn't know what else to do. "Okay," she said, and decided to text Caitlin as soon as she reasonably could.

* * *

After sweating blood over his calculator, Cisco finished the exam with half an hour to spare and emailed it to his professor, checking his sent mail for the timestamp. Phew. Okay. Awesome. He was done with his semester and now he could go find Caitlin at - He could go to the party.

He changed shirts and shaved, because he'd forgotten to do it before his Science Writing final this morning and was looking extra Sasquatch-y now. He ran his fingers through his hair, decided it was sexily disheveled and not hobo-tastic, and grabbed his keys.

Two steps out the door, he spotted the car parked on the sidewalk, idling, and grinned a little. Whoever it was had better hope campus police were too lazy to care, tonight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw them.

Ronnie. Standing close to Caitlin, both of them illuminated by the light over the front door. She was smiling up at him, hugging her elbows as he typed something into a phone. Her phone, Cisco realized when he handed it back.

"There," Ronnie said. "I texted myself."

"Great," she said, and her voice was breathless.

Cisco grabbed the side of the building to steady himself.

"So, we'll hang out over break?"

"I'd like that."

"You cold?"

"A little." She rubbed her hands together. She'd probably left her gloves somewhere again.

Ronnie took her hands, wrapping his own around them, grinning at her. "Damn. You need gloves."

She smiled back at him. "I have gloves. I have a lot of gloves. None of them are here, is the problem."

He laughed and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Um - I'm really glad I ran into you tonight."

"Me too."

He touched her cheek with one finger, like a silent question. She hesitated, then tipped her face up toward his. He smiled shyly and leaned down to kiss her.

Cisco felt like he was going to slide right down to the snowy ground, and dissolve into one of the chilly slush puddles. He wished he could. He wished he wasn't watching this, frozen, watching the way that she put her hands on Ronnie's sides, the way he cupped her face in his hands.

An eternity later, they pulled apart, and Ronnie squeezed her hands again. "So. I'll text you, okay?"

"Okay," she said, and pulled out her key. "Good night. Drive safe."

Then it was like the freeze-ray that had caught Cisco let go, and he could turn his back and duck back into the side door. He leaned back against the wall and thought, _don't throw up, don't throw up._

_How dare she?_ he thought furiously, and then equally furiously, _Why not? Why the hell shouldn't she kiss a hot guy if she wanted to?_ She didn't have a boyfriend. She'd never had a boyfriend. She had a dude who she was fucking sometimes, that wasn't the same.

He squeezed his eyes closed, but the future unrolled in the dark behind his lids.

Ronnie would text her over break. She would blush and smile and text back. They would talk for hours. They would hang out over break. He would kiss her again before he left, and say, _So I'm free next Wednesday, you want to do this again?_

And she would say, _Yes._

When they came back to school in January, she'd walk down the hall of Thawne House, holding hands with Ronnie. Maybe if Cisco was walking down the hall too, she would smile at him - no, they both would, because Ronnie was a good guy - and say _hi, how was break?_ He would answer something stupid and watch while she unlocked her door and held it open so Ronnie could go in, and then close it behind them.

It all felt as inevitable as a tsunami.

* * *

Caitlin felt tottery and wobbly as she walked down the hall to her room, and not just because of her heels or the two Lemon Drops she'd had.

She kept replaying the kiss. It had been good. She'd liked it. Ronnie was a good kisser. He didn't kiss like Cisco, but his kiss had been nice, warm, gentle, not pushy, not sloppy, and his body had been warm and firm against hers even if she'd had to tilt her head back to account for his height.

A good kiss. Yes. Just - just not anything like -

She frowned to herself.

A sound from the end of the hall made her look up, and she called out, "Cisco!"

He was going out the side door. At her voice, he went still.

"Cisco?" she asked more quietly.

He turned. "Hey."

"Hi. Did you get your final turned in?"

"Yep. No problem. So, was the party still going?"

"Oh, yes. I just wanted to come back early." There was something strange about him tonight. Something in his eyes and the set of his shoulders.

"Yeah, I see that."

She said, "Actually, Ronnie brought me back. Ronnie Raymond?"

"That was nice of him."

"It was. He was very, um, flirty. Tonight. He gave me his number. And he - he kissed me."

"Yeah? How was that?"

She was so used to telling him the truth about anything sexual that she said automatically, "Um - nice. Yes. It was good." Her face went hot. Was that weird? To tell the boy you were sleeping with about another boy who'd kissed you? That had to be weird. That had to be a bad idea.

She couldn't think, she felt fuzzy and off-balance, and the strange hardness of Cisco's eyes, like marbles, was throwing her off further.

But he smiled at her (a strange smile, glassy and hard like his eyes). "Well, good for you. Nice. Awesome." He zipped up his jacket. "All right. Well, see you."

"Wait! Where are you going?"

"The party," he said, laughing a little. "I'm done with finals! I've got steam to blow off."

She took a few quick steps toward him. "But I came back."

"Mhm."

"To see you. Because we're not, you know, going to see each other until next month. So this is really our last chance for awhile to - you know."

He raised his brows at her. "To fuck?"

He said that word all the time. He teased her about how shy she was, saying it in public. But this time, it felt different. This time, it felt like a slap.

"Yes," she said. "To - to fuck." She was horribly aware of the hallway around them. They never talked like this except in his bedroom or hers. Hardly anybody was even still here, at this point in finals week, but she still felt exposed.

"Hmmm." He gave a little nod. "Actually, under the circumstances, I'm going to pass."

She went cold all over. Her scalp went tight. "What?"

"Remember our deal? About how, if one of us decided we were interested in someone else, we'd break it off, no hard feelings?"

"You - are you interested in someone else?" Her voice had gone very high, and it teetered around like she had in her high heels.

"No, you are!" He said it the same way he'd told her he was going to the party. Like, why are we talking about this? Isn't it self-evident?

"It was just a kiss."

"A good kiss, you said. And he gave you his number. And flirted with you. And drove you all the way back here."

All the way? It was a five-minute drive. "And, so?"

"So, if I had to guess, you've had a crush on him since you took that class together, haven't you?"

She swallowed. "I - maybe. So what if I have?" Her breath was coming panic-fast now. This was all wrong. How had it gone so wrong?

"And he likes you."

Why did he sound so casual about that? "It would seem that way."

"No, he told me. He likes you. He's liked you for awhile. You both like each other, which is awesome. So, I'm honoring the deal. No hard feelings." He smiled at her again. Now it looked like a piece of paper he'd laid over his face. "I enjoyed this. I did. It was fun. You're fun. Have a good break, okay?"

Before he could turn and go out the door, she said very fast, "Don't you think that's my call? Whether I'm interested enough in him to break things off with you?"

His smile faded. "C'mon Caitlin," he said, very, very quietly. "Just give me this out."

There was a screw in her stomach, and it tightened with every second that passed, every moment that said, _This is happening, you're being dumped, you're being dumped by the first boy you ever -_ "I beg your pardon," she said, ludicrously formal. "I didn't realize you wanted an out."

He let out his breath. "Don't you think this thing, with us, don't you think it's run its course?"

"No," she said. "No, I don't. But you do?"

"Yeah. Seems like it."

"Oh, I see. Your project's done with," she said. "Your project that distracted you all semester."

His brows drew together. "Distracted me."

"From thinking about your grandma."

"Who told you about that?" His voice rose.

"Well, definitely not you!" she shouted back. "But now you don't need distraction, do you? So the project is done. Run its course. You've successfully educated the pathetic virgin."

He ran a hand through his hair. "Jesus Christ. I don't know how many more ways I can say this. Nobody ever gave a shit about the state of your cherry except you. Nobody's paying any attention to you or what you do or who you fuck. Your parents aren't news, and they hasn't been for a long time. Yeah, it was bad once, but that was five fucking years ago."

Now it wasn't just her stomach. Now it was everything, her skin and her scalp, her fingers, her toes. Everything knotted up tight. "How do you know about my parents?"

"The same way you know about my grandma. Not from you. But I was never anything but your piece on the side anyway. Good enough to fuck, but not good enough to share anything with, or tell anybody about. Like father, like daughter, right?"

"You know, I think you're right," she said. "I think this has run its course. I think it ran its course a long time ago. I think I should have kicked you out of my room that first morning and never spoken to you again."

"Yeah," he said. "I think you're right." He whipped around and shoved the door hard enough that it slammed open, dumping a load of snow from the awning down over his head as he stormed out. He screamed "FUCK!" into the night and slammed the door behind him.

She stood in the middle of the hallway, thinking, _I should cry. I should be crying right now._ She blinked her desert-dry eyes.

This was one thing she'd never had on her list. But she'd managed it anyway. Getting her heart broken.

And then she did start to cry.


	15. . . . Fucked Up So Bad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually try to post on Mondays and Fridays, but I won't be posting this coming Monday because the next chapter needs a lot more work than I can manage in two days, especially when I have to work one of them. I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not, because it's maybe the most important chapter in this whole story and it's got to be just right. So I'll just say hang in there, and I'll post it as soon as I'm satisfied with it.

_New Year's Day_

When Cisco woke up, it took him a bleary moment to realize that he wasn't in his bed. He wasn't even in a bed. He was on an unfamiliar couch, in an unfamiliar apartment, still in the clothes he'd worn out the night before, with a huge, squishy blanket thrown over him. He groaned and closed his eyes again.

How much had he had to drink?

Way too much.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much.

_Please don't let me have done anything stupid._

With his eyes still clenched closed, he rooted around in his pockets for his phone. Nowhere. "Shit," he whispered. "Shit. Shit, shit, shit."

Had he really sent a mass text to his whole address book? Including Caitlin?

He had to check.

A key scraped in the lock, and he opened his eyes. A moment later, Dante walked in the door, carrying two plastic bags that wafted the smell of life-saving ambrosia.

"He lives," his brother said, walking through to the tiny kitchen and setting his bags down. "I got menudo. Not Mama's, don't get excited. It's from Los Betos down the street."

"Why am I here?"

"Why, thank you, Dante. You're really the best brother ever. Letting my sloppy drunk ass pass out on your couch? Covering for you with Mami? Getting menudo for your hangover? Best brother ever!"

"Where's my phone?"

Dante pulled it out of his pocket and held it up. "You gave it to me around 1 am and told me not to give it back however much you begged."

"Can I have it back?"

"Mmmmm, no."

"What?"

"I'm just following your instructions here, mijo."

"Asshole. Did anyone text? Check. Please?"

Dante looked at the screen. "A bunch of people. Happy New Year, Happy New Year, HNY - " He scrolled. "Barry says _How am I supposed to stop you dumbass,_ which, agreed. Happy New Year, Happy New Year, we should hang out, aaaaand one last Happy New Year." He put the phone back in his pocket. "Nothing from Caitlin. That's her name? The girl you didn't want to text?"

Cisco folded into the couch, wrapping his arms around his churning stomach. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Good. That's good."

"Good? Really?"

Dante eyed him, but at that moment, his own phone rang, and he answered it. His face crumpled into a wince. "Hi, Mama."

Cisco dragged himself off the couch, pulling the blanket along with him. Dante opened the fridge and pushed a water bottle at him, still talking to their mom. He drank it, slowly, and then sat at the tiny card table and pulled the lid off one of the big cartons of menudo, stirring it with one of the plastic spoons from the bag, without any particular appetite.

He felt like he'd been sick all break. Like he'd had the flu and it wasn't going away, it was just sticking around. His whole body hurt with missing her. It was like withdrawal. His hands missed her skin, his lips missed her mouth. And his heart felt like one giant bruise, thudding away in his chest.

It was good she hadn't texted him back. He was trying to cut himself off. He didn't deserve for her to write back to him. Why would she? He'd been shitty.

He'd taken the one thing, the worst thing he could have picked, out of all that horrible secret he knew, and he'd thrown it in her face. Just to hurt her. Just to maybe make her feel like he did, his center torn out because he was losing the thing he hadn't known he wanted most.

He'd been more than shitty. He'd been a sewer, swimming with filth.

"No," Dante said. "No, Mama. I don't think you're stupid. It was just - okay. Okay. What?" His eyes turned to Cisco. "No. He's still asleep. What? Okay. I'll tell him. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mami, he's okay, I looked after him, he didn't - I - " His mouth fell open. "What? How is that my f- I know, but Mami, he's nineteen, he makes his own - Okay, okay, Jesus, you don't gotta yell. All right. Tomorrow. Okay." He rolled his eyes. "Yes. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. I love you, too. Bye." He hung up. "You're in deep shit."

"Okay," Cisco said dully.

"You have to go over to Tia Julieta's tomorrow and help her with her tablet."

"Okay."

"That's Tia Julieta with the dog Sonny."

"We only have one." And she was old, and sweet, and her comfort with technology stopped around 1972. Also her dog humped everything he could reach. Teaching her how to to use her new tablet was going to be a loooooooong-ass afternoon.

"If you ask me, you lucked out. I have to babysit for Rodrigo and Carolina tomorrow, because I'm the big brother and I should know better."

"Sorry."

Dante rolled his eyes and got up to root around in the fridge.

With some menudo in him, Cisco started to feel more human, and what his brother was making on the stove started to smell good. "Hey, uh, can you - "

"Way ahead of you.," Dante said, pulling two plates down and dividing the contents of the pan between them. "Gotta soak up some of that crap."

He'd scrambled a couple of eggs with a tamale left over from Christmas Eve - green corn, Cisco was pretty sure. They ate quietly, passing the salsa back and forth across the table.

"Mira, Dante - "

"I've got to - "

They both stopped.

"You go first," Dante said.

"Just wanted to say thanks for putting up with my drunk ass last night," Cisco said, chasing one last piece of tamale around his plate.

"Well, that's the deal. I look after you. What are big brothers for?"

"I heard some of your songs," he offered. "You sounded pretty rockin'."

Dante's mouth curled up at the corners, but he shrugged and said, "You were trashed."

"No, before I started drinking. You sounded good, you did."

"Not just wasting my life fucking around on a keyboard?"

"That was - " Cisco swallowed. "I was pissed off when I said that. I didn't mean it. You always sound good to me. But you've been working on it, huh?"

"Granpa made me practice a lot more when i was living with him. He liked hearing the old songs, you know, like the stuff we did when we were kids. So I've been playing a lot more, outside of gigs."

"Huh, okay. Guess it paid off."

They looked at anything besides each other.

"I shouldn't have asked you to quit school," Dante said.

Cisco let out his breath in a surprised burst. "What?"

"I shouldn't've asked you to quit school and move in with Granpa instead of me," Dante repeated. "I was pissed off, too. I didn't wanna do it. I knew he needed help even before Papi asked me to. And you never - you just always did what I told you. So I thought you'd do this. But you told me to fuck off instead."

"I should've been here, though. I should've helped with Granpa. I knew he was going to fall apart after Nana died."

"No. You shut your stupid face right now, okay? Nana would've been the first person to tell you to get your ass back to school and use your genius brain and go be a big shot engineer. And you wanted it too. I'm so fucking proud of you for telling me off, dorkus. After I got over being pissed off because you were making me act like a goddamn adult for once in my life instead of pretending that playing coffee shops and getting high with Florian Mendoza was going to somehow make me a rock star." Dante fiddled with his fork. "I mean, I'm supposed to be the big brother, here, but you knew better."

"Not always," Cisco said. "A lot, though."

"Asshole."

"I'm telling Mom."

Dante balled up a napkin from the takeout bag and threw it at him. "So. Now. I'm gonna continue this big brother trend and make you tell me all about Caitlin and why it was the disaster of the century that you texted her."

* * *

Felicity blinked a few times. "Wow," she said quietly.

Caitlin nodded and blew her nose. "I know."

"That was awful, what he said."

"Yes."

"It was true, though. You know that, right?"

Caitlin buried her face in Felicity shoulder and sobbed, because she couldn't deny it. She really had treated Cisco like her dad had treated her mom. Using him for her own selfish reasons, insisting that nobody could know. Acting like she was ashamed of what was between them, when really he was one of the best things in her life.

And the worst part, she hadn't even known it until he'd said that, and then it was like a spotlight shining in her eyes.

Her sister stroked her hair until Caitlin quieted and then said, "You messed up."

"I know."

"But so did he."

"No, he - "

"Yeah. He did. You know what you two did? Or didn't do."

"I know. It was stupid to keep it a secret even after I started to get some friends who were nice and who would have understood - " She whimpered, wishing that she'd told Iris, at least, during one of their movie nights. Whispered it in her ear like a giggled secret, and then she would have had someone to tell about how she was beginning to want more than sex, and what she could do about it.

"That's not it, but that didn't help. Nope, you stopped talking to _him._ You were so open when you first hooked up, but only about sex. Not about anything important. Not about anything that would have made you really, honestly vulnerable. And remember that he kept things from you. He's not completely blameless here."

Caitlin opened her mouth to argue, and remembered all the times he'd deflected her questions about his family, or about the fight with his brother, with a shrug and a joke. She took a series of hiccuping breaths, while Felicity continued to stroke her hair. "What do I do?" she asked finally.

Felicity put out her hand. "Gimme your phone."

Caitlin rooted around on her nightstand. It buzzed in her hand, another text message, and she read it before registering that it was from an unknown number.

_Comment on McDonnell divorce?_

_Will pay $$$$_

She made a disgusted noise and swiped the text away.

"Text?" Felicity asked.

"Yes. Four dollar signs this time."

"Turn it to airplane mode for right now. Ollie's got people on it. Our numbers are going to change today."

"But - "

"I promise that all the data will be preserved. You won't lose any texts."

Caitlin put it in airplane mode and handed it over, then stared at the ceiling and thought about the moment her phone had buzzed with the first Google Alert, two days ago.

_Senator Gordon McDonnell, Wife File for Divorce._ Not in a sordid tabloid or website, but a mention in the New York Goddamn Times, as Felicity had shrieked. The article referred to the old scandal, and said, _Anna Smoak could not be reached for comment._

All the follow-up articles, the news items, the mentions on TV, said the same thing. Anna Smoak could not be reached for comment. But that didn't stop them from trying, or trying to prise a comment out of her daughters. Now that Caitlin and Felicity were both legal adults, they didn't even have that tenuous protection. After the reporters got too obnoxious, they'd had to leave Felicity's cramped studio apartment and sneak into a rather more luxurious apartment that Oliver had magicked up out of nowhere.

Caitlin kept waiting to feel crushed, exposed, helpless, the way she had five years ago. She waited to feel the swamping terror of stepping foot out of the house, of turning on the TV, or opening up the Internet.

But things were already so bad that this was like a pebble rolling off a mountain.

Or maybe it had never been so bad as she'd always dreaded.

And of course that made her feel worse.

Felicity read her texts for awhile - first Ronnie's, all the ones from the past two weeks and her replies. Then she scrolled back and read Cisco's, which ended abruptly two weeks ago. She rested the phone on her stomach. "I know how you think, so I'm gonna lay out your options just the way you like it. Ready?"

"Mhm."

"Okay. You've got three choices here. One - " She held up a finger. "You can start fresh. By which I mean, dating Ronnie. Pro: he sounds like he's just waiting for the word. He's cute and nice and sweet and smart, and you've had a thing for him for a year and a half. I think he would be a great boyfriend, and you would get to do this from the ground up, with some hard-won lessons under your belt, and the resolution to do better with this guy. But - cons. You'd always know that it started in a total shit storm, even if Ronnie never does. And you'd have to let Cisco go. Maybe you guys could hash it out, when things have settled and emotions aren't so high. You apologize, you hug, maybe you promise to be friends. But anything else is over. It would have to be."

Caitlin's hand clenched restlessly in the covers.

"Then there's option two. You try to work things out with Cisco. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Pro: if it does, it would be wonderful. Because it sounded to me, that when things were good, they were very good. Amazing, in fact. He brought you out of your shell and you helped him focus on important things when he needed to. And of course, the sex was great. Buuuuut - two cons. One, you might not be able to work it out. He might not be willing, or things could just be too broken to fix."

Caitlin sniffed, and wiped her eyes.

"And, you'd have to let go of the possibility of Ronnie. Because you can't really do your best work on a relationship if you have someone else waiting in the wings. That's not fair to anybody. Not Cisco, not Ronnie, and least of all you."

"What's my third choice?"

"You cut them both loose. You say, 'Boys, this has been not-fun. Go on your way.' Pro, you get rid of all that mess. You cut it out of your life. You take some time, you think some thinks, and then you see what or who else is out there. Con, you lose out on both of them. The possibility of Ronnie and everything good that you and Cisco had together."

"It sounds so detached," Caitlin said. "Pros and cons. It doesn't sound like love at all."

"Oh my god, Caitie. This is exactly what love is." She rolled over and sat up. "Look. It's not destiny or fate, where it's all out of your hands. It's completely in your hands. Love is a choice you make. It's picking someone because you want to be with them, whatever happens. And not just picking them once. Picking them every day. Someone you're able to be intimate with, and not in a sexy way, but in an honest, vulnerable, painful way. It's that person where you say, 'To have you, to be with you, I'll put up with ex-girlfriends popping out of the woodwork and paparazzi taking pictures of my lunch and how whenever you get chicken marsala for dinner, you fart all night long.' To understand, both of you, that what you've got isn't perfect and it never will be, but it's close enough that you still want to fight for it."

She stared at the ceiling. It sounded terrifying. More terrifying was what Felicity had said earlier - that it might be too broken to fix. "I don't know what to do."

Felicity leaned over and tucked her hair behind her ear. "I'm not in your head, baby. You're the only one who knows what you're willing to fight for."

* * *

Dante leaned back in his chair, staring at him. "I have a lot of questions."

"The answer to all of them is that I'm an idiot."

"That's the answer to all questions, everywhere. But my actual first question here is, why didn't you say something? Like, 'hey, this is super-fun but the whole secret thing is getting a little old for me, so how about let's just admit it if people ask.'"

"Not telling was a ground rule," Cisco said. "That was the first thing she said."

"And nobody's ever renegotiated a relationship."

"It wasn't a - "

"Coulda fooled me. From the sounds of it, coulda fooled you, too. In fact, it did."

Cisco put his head on his folded arms. "Because," he muttered to the table. "I was worried she'd break it off."

"Yyyyyyyup. That's it. Right there. And that's why you never said, 'hey, I love that you want my hot bod, but can we maybe do something more like dating?' Because you were worried she'd break it off, for you wanting something more?"

"Mhm."

"And you let that wanting sit there, and you just focused on having fun with her and ignoring it. And by the time you found out she had a big nasty secret she wasn't telling anybody, but most of all not you, it had gone rotten like an old potato. And then because you're a genius, what did you do?"

He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes at his brother. "This is such a good talk. I can't even tell you. You're the best, most comforting brother ever."

"Come on. What happened?"

"I nuked it from orbit."

Dante paused. "I was actually going to say, you broke it off before she could, but nuked it from orbit pretty much covers that."

Cisco pressed his fingers into his eyes He had the hot, thick feeling behind his eyes and in his throat that meant he was about thirty seconds away from crying, max.

"So what are you going to do now?"

"What can I do?"

"Maybe - this is crazy talk, I realize - apologize."

"Like she'd actually forgive me? After that?"

"I didn't say she'd forgive you, necessarily. I said you need to apologize."

"What if she doesn't want to hear it?"

"If she doesn't wanna hear it, then listen to her and go away again. My point is, you'll still have said it." Dante shifted forward. "What's the worst case scenario here, mijo? That she'll break up with you? Done. That she'll start dating this other dude? Maybe also done."

Cisco stared at a tear in the cheap vinyl surface of the card table, at the little bits of fuzz and string escaping from underneath. "That she'll never talk to me again."

Dante stayed quiet.

"I could get used to seeing her with Raymond eventually. I think. I mean I've been waiting for that hammer to fall since before Thanksgiving, so - " He swallowed bile. "Especially if he makes her happy, I could get used to that. She should be happy. But I couldn't stand it if she wasn't even my friend anymore. Even before I fell for her, I liked her. She's funny and she's smart and she's sweet in ways you don't even - " He looked down at his plate. "I don't know if I can ever get over _liking_ her, and if she just cuts me out of her life - that would be the worst."

"Okay," Dante said. "Now. If you just let this sit, maybe pretend that fight never happened. Act like she never hurt you, you never hurt her. What the hell do you think is going to happen?"

"She'll never talk to me again. And I wouldn't blame her for not wanting to talk to such a fucking coward. Yeah. Okay. _Okay._ I get it. I'll - I'll apologize." He wasn't exactly sure how. But Dante was right - he had to try.

Dante slapped his phone down in the middle of the table. "Do it now."

"What?"

"You've let this sit for two weeks already. Don't let it go until you get back to school because you'll knot yourself up even more, and who knows what she's thinking. Hey, if us two can admit we're stubborn assholes and make up, you can definitely apologize to the girl you love."

"What should I say?"

"Jesus, idiot, I'm not going to do everything for you."

Cisco pulled his phone toward himself. He couldn't help reading the last exchange of texts between the two of them.

_done w/work, free tonite?_

**Exam 9 am, sorry**

**After?**

_sci wrtg final and calc take-home, 2moro is shot_ He'd added the cry-laughing emoji. _Going 2 party @Scott's?_

**Good luck on your exams, I'll see you there**

What if he'd actually managed to finish his calc final in enough time to go to that party? Maybe this wouldn't even be happening right now. Maybe he'd've laughed and danced and gotten a little drunk with her, and they would have gone back to Thawne and been kissing before the door was closed all the way.

Or maybe he would have watched Raymond flirt with her, and he'd've made a jealous ass of himself at the party, with a million people watching, and she would have been the one to nuke him from orbit.

"Hey, pendejo," Dante said, and he looked up. "This, you don't text. You let her hear your voice. How sorry you are. How you mean it."

Cisco lowered his phone.

"Yes. Call her."

Cisco had to try three times before he forced himself to tap the call button, and then he had to listen to it ring. His stomach squirmed. He really, really hoped that she let it go to voicemail, so he could say something and not risk breaking down when he heard her voice -

"This number is no longer in service."

He yanked the phone away from his ear and stared at it.

"What?"

"I - it doesn't work. The number. It's no longer in service." He disconnected and went to his texts, checking the replies to his stupid mass text. "I didn't get a message last night. Shit," he said blankly. "Oh. Oh, shit. What if she blocked me?"

"That's not the message you get," Dante said. "You don't get any message at all when someone blocks you."

"How do you know?"

"Florian had some exes that he wasn't exactly okay with just letting be ex."

Cisco was distracted for a moment. "Dude. Florian was the worst."

"Yeah, I know. He had good weed, though." Dante sighed. "Okay, so she changed her number. I doubt she changed her number just because of your dumb ass. Send her a Facebook message. Get the first apology out of the way, then ask for her new number. Then call her."

"She doesn't have Facebook. She doesn't have Twitter or Snapchat or Whatsapp or anything." Cisco shook his phone in the air. "This was literally the only way I ever got ahold of her besides going and knocking on her goddamn door."

"Stop freaking out. Doesn't she have an email? Like even just from the school?"

Cisco blinked. "Oh. I forgot about that. I never even use it except for homework. Right. What do I say?"

"Again. Not doing it for you." Dante picked up his plate. "You've got a whole car ride to think about that. Mama said to haul your hungover ass back home when you woke up, so let's go face the music."

* * *

After he hung his head and said all the appropriate things - _no, Mama, I know, I was stupid, yes, I know the deal, okay, I'll go help Auntie tomorrow_ \- and Dante had whispered something to her that made her eye him compassionately - she wasn't blind, she'd seen him moping around - he was allowed to go shower and change his clothes.

"You are so spoiled," Dante said to him when he emerged, hair towel-damp and feeling at least seventy-five percent human.

"Shut up," Cisco said, and got himself a bowl of his mama's soup to eat while he tried to write the hardest email of his life.

He took his computer and sat in the front room, listening to Dante and Granpa arguing over the game, trying to figure out the best way of packing all his regret and his feelings into a few words on a screen.

Barry came over, disgustingly not hungover - seriously, the guy never got hangovers no matter what he drank, it was inhuman and unfair. He served up his own bowl of menudo and said, "You okay? You've been staring at that for ten minutes."

Cisco said, "What do I write, man?" He'd filled him in quietly, under the sound of touchdowns, and his best friend had the common decency not to say _I told you so._

Barry stirred his soup. "Be real," he said softly. "Be honest. This isn't the time for self-preservation. And then back off. Let her come to you."

"What if she never comes to me?"

"Then you're gonna have to handle that, I guess."


	16. . . . Begged Forgiveness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are so lovely and patient! The next chapter should be up as usual on Monday.

After two hours, Cisco had three sentences.

_What I said was completely shitty and I'm sorry. Please, can you call me? I really want to talk to you._

He stared at them for another fifteen minutes, hating every word, every letter, for how feeble and ineffectual they were. But he couldn't come up with anything better. He squeezed his eyes shut and hit "send."

For the rest of the day, he dove for his phone every time it buzzed. But every text was another casual 'happy new year' or 'wanna hang out' from somebody who wasn't Caitlin. Every email was a fat wad of attachments from professors to read before the new semester started. When he got a phone call, the only thing that stopped him from cursing them out for not being Caitlin was that it was his cousin's kid. He sat, forcing a smile and responding to Benny's happy two-year-old gibberish until his cousin Carmela got the phone away from him and said, "Sorry, Cisquito, sorry."

He told her it was okay but he had to go, and hung up.

He didn't sleep that night.

By the next day, hope was starting to fade. He was telling himself to give it time, just let her come to him like Barry said. But his own words - _what if she never does?_ \- haunted him.

He spent the afternoon at his great-aunt's, eating the cookies she'd baked (okay, fine, Tia Julieta did at least make killer cookies) and patiently going over and over the intricacies of her new tablet while feeding the dog more cookies (the oatmeal raisin ones; he wasn't actually a monster).

"Here, Tia," he said when she'd mostly gotten the hang of e-mail and Facebook. "Come on, I'm gonna find you some sites you'll like."

"Okay, darling," she said cheerfully, handing it over and pushing herself up from the table. "I'm going to get you some jugo right now. You like apple? Does that have the People magazine in it?"

"Sure." He navigated to the website and saved it as an icon on her home screen. "Come look, okay?"

"Mande?" She peered over his shoulder. "Oooo." She was addicted to gossip mags.

He swiped, showing her how there was more when you went down the screen. He glanced at the headlines and froze.

She chattered about some movie star who'd gotten engaged and had a big-ass diamond ring, and it buzzed in his ear.

"Tia," he said, swallowing against his suddenly dry throat. "Tia, you got this, right? You're okay now?"

"Uh-huh." She tapped at the screen to look at the star's ring even bigger.

"Okay, because I'm gonna go, okay?"

"Okay, darling. Besitos."

He kissed her cheek, and said he'd give his mom her love, and escaped.

In his car, he pulled up the same website on his phone and searched for the headline he'd spotted. He read the article through, then tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and rested his head against the wheel.

"Fuck," he whispered.

He started driving aimlessly, his brain churning. He didn't realize how long it had been until he suddenly noticed all the other cars on the road were turning on their headlights.

When he finally pulled up at the house, there was a strange car parked in front behind Dante's truck. A semi-strange car. He felt like he should recognize it. Probably just one of Dante's friends.

Dante came bounding out the front door. "Hey, asshole, why are you just sitting there?"

"I was thinking," Cisco said. "Are Mama and Granpa still out?"

"Yeah. Get your ass inside."

And his dad was working the afternoon shift. He thought briefly about texting them, then decided it was too much to explain. "No, I've got to - " He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, tell them I had to go, okay? I'll be back tomorrow. Probably. I'll be okay. I'll text when I get there but I have to go now."

"When you get where?"

"Starling City," he said.

"Oh Jesus Christ," Dante said quietly.

"I have to go now, because it's like a six hour drive."

"Okay, you really need to come inside."

"No, I don't, I've got everything I need." He patted his pockets. "Wallet and phone and keys, I'll get other crap on the way."

"Take ten fucking minutes and -"

"Do you not get it? It's going to be late by the time I get there even if I leave now, and the longer I take here, the later it'll be and - "

Dante started to grab his keys and Cisco punched him in the shoulder. "Get off, cabron!"

"Would you listen!" Dante yelled. "Would you - "

"Cisco?"

He dropped his keys.

She stood on the top step of his porch, of his house where he'd grown up, her eyes wide and her hair blowing all over the place.

Caitlin.

"She turned up about an hour ago," Dante said quietly. "You weren't answering your fucking phone. I must've texted you twenty times. I called Barry and he's been calling you. I even called Tia Julieta's and she said you were long gone."

"I was driving around," Cisco said, staring at her like she might dissolve. Now that he thought about it, he had heard his phone buzz a couple of times. Maybe more than a couple. "Thinking. What's she doing here?"

"Here's a thought. How about you go ask her?"

When she hugged her elbows, he woke up to the fact that it was about thirty degrees out and she was standing in the wind with no coat or hat or gloves. He swallowed and picked up his keys, then walked up the front path, taking each step like he was walking on step-stones through lava. "Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said softly.

"It's freezing," he said. "Come inside, okay?"

She followed him inside, silent. Dante followed them both, closing the door behind him.

"You want anything?' Cisco asked, stripping his coat off and dumping it on a chair. "Um. Something to eat? Some water?"

She gestured at the table. "Your brother got me some soup. And some coffee. I'm okay."

He looked. The soup bowl was mostly full. The coffee was half-empty. He said, "Thanks," to Dante for some reason.

"No problem," Dante said. "Uh. Listen, I'm going to be in the other room, okay? Watching TV. Really loudly."

"Okay," he said, still staring at Caitlin.

A minute later, a game show blared from the living room, and he blinked, realizing that Dante had left them alone.

He opened his mouth to say something, but she beat him to it. "I'm sorry," she said. "You were going somewhere."

"Yeah. I was going to Starling City."

"Why?"

"To see you. I couldn't get you on your phone and you never answered the email, so I was just gonna - " He flapped a hand. "Go."

"You don't even know where I'm staying."

"Well, I figured I had a six-hour drive to find out. Some way."

"You just decided you were going to come see me?"

He looked at his shoes. "Not to - just to - I wanted you to know you weren't alone."

He looked up. She was watching him, her face unreadable.

"I was over at my tia's house right now, teaching her how to use the tablet that we got her for Christmas, and we were on this gossip, she loves 'em, and I saw - " He swallowed. "There was this article about - about your dad. About how he was getting a divorce from your - um - "

"From his wife," she said quietly.

"Yeah. So. Are you okay?"

"I actually am," she said. "Mostly. I spent so long being scared of it happening again, everybody talking about my family and my parents and everything. And now it's happened and it's - it's not _good_. Obviously. But it's not as completely awful as I always thought it would be. They don't know me. They're not talking about me, or us. Just some people they think they know. I can survive. I already did once."

"That's - huh. That's a pretty healthy way of looking at it."

"It's what my sister's been telling me for years." She smiled a little. It looked strained, and it dissolved almost at once. "You were going to come see me?"

He nodded. His nails dug into his palms. He wanted to touch her, hug her, but he didn't know what she'd do.

"I didn't think you'd ever want to see me again." She blinked at him. "What do you mean, your email?"

"I sent you something. Yesterday. When I couldn't get you on the phone. You changed your number."

"We had to, both of us. I haven't looked at email. I've been preoccupied. What did you say?"

"That I was sorry. And I wanted to talk to you."

She swallowed. "I think we've got a lot to talk about."

"Yeah."

She looked over his shoulder at the living room, where Dante was still watching TV. "Um, can we go somewhere else?"

He said, "My room?" and hoped the TV was too loud for her to hear how his voice shook.

She nodded.

* * *

His room was at the end of a hall lined with pictures. She caught fleeting impressions of Cisco and his brother at various ages, and older photos, black and white, sepia, of weddings and families and babies in long white gowns. But she was too busy reminding herself to breathe to take in any of them properly.

His room was small and dim with twilight. He slapped on the light and tugged his desk chair free, spinning it around and backing off, silently offering. She took it, and he leaned against his chest of drawers, crossing his arms, then uncrossing them and putting his hands in his back pockets.

She tried not to look at the bed. Instead, she looked around.

She didn't know what she expected - a copy of his dorm room, maybe, with Bill Nye on the wall, and socks on the floor. The desk was the same, piled high with scrawled-on pads of the graph paper he favored, a half-empty jar of jelly beans, his familiar computer sitting on top of a huge Lord of the Rings omnibus with golden scrolling on the spine. She looked up at a slightly mutated X-wing hanging from the ceiling, and then at the posters on the wall - Star Trek and Dr Who, alongside Selena Gomez and Zac Efron.

He saw her looking at the last two posters and muttered, "In my defense, that's from when I was twelve."

His room; his house, his family. Although she'd been naked with him any number of times, she felt as if she was seeing more of him right now than she ever had before.

She thought of all the things she'd decided to say on the long, long drive, but what came out of her mouth was, "Why did you ask me that first? About my father and his divorce. About how I was doing."

"I wanted to make sure you were okay."

She thought she'd cried herself dry, but tears burned behind her eyes. "Why?"

"Be-because," he stammered. "I care if you're okay."

"But it was so easy for you to walk away."

His mouth fell open. "Easy?"

"'This has been fun,'" she quoted. "'You're fun. Have a good break.'" Her voice cracked on the last word.

He stared at her. "Oh god. Oh, god. Are you telling me - ?" He ran both his hands over his hair, his face openly devastated. "Here I thought the worst, most horrible thing I said was about you being like your dad."

"That was true," she said. "It was awful, but it was true. And no. It wasn't the worst thing you said to me."

He closed his eyes, and then opened them again and met hers. "Thing is, I saw you," he said. "With Ronnie. Kissing him."

She felt lightheaded all of a sudden. "So you knew already. When I told you."

"Even if I hadn't, I might've reacted like that. I wasn't lying. He did tell me he liked you and I'd been waiting for something like that to happen, and I was - yeah, I was trying to make it easy. The end. An easy end. For you. Maybe for me. I didn't want you to know that - that seeing that, it felt - "

"What?"

He shook his head. "But that's not what you heard, is it? You heard somebody who was throwing you away. Like you didn't matter. Like you'd never mattered. Again."

She covered her mouth with her hands and pushed herself up from the chair. She couldn't cry here. She would go out to her car and sob if she had to, but she couldn't cry in front of him before she'd said everything she needed to say.

"Caitlin," he said. "Please. Don't go. Please."

She stood, breathing into her cupped hands like a brown paper bag. A science fair ribbon on the wall wavered and blurred in her vision.

"Look. That was - I'm sorry for that. I'm so sorry. It's not true. You were never my project, whatever the fuck that means. You need to know, you matter. To me. You matter a lot. And that won't stop, whatever happens with us. Okay? You matter. I just - I just really want you to know that."

Two scorching hot tears escaped and ran over her knuckles. She breathed some more. In, out, feeling like someone was doing CPR on her.

The words settled into her - over her shoulders, around her neck, into her palms and around her wrists, coiled in her stomach.

_You matter._

She wiped her eyes.

"There's Kleenex," he said, muffled. "On the bookshelf."

She took one and wiped the remnants of tears off her fingers, then dabbed at her eyes. She looked at the mascara smudges on the tissue. So much for waterproof.

"And that's what I did to you," she said. "I made you feel like you didn't matter."

His silence answered that.

She turned. His face was drawn and pale, his eyes reddened.

"Not that it excuses anything," she said. "But I didn't know I could make anybody feel like that. Much less you. You're always so - "

Easy. Laughing. Careless. Irreverent.

"I'm a runty, queer, brown nerd," he said. "I learned a long time ago not to let people know they could hurt me." He looked away, fiddling with something on his bookshelf. "Mostly it works, but sometimes - wow. Sometimes it _really_ backfires."

"Cisco - that doesn't - I shouldn't have made that condition."

"I get it, you know," he said. "I saw the things they said about your mom a-and - I get why you hate even the thought of someone talking about you, ever. But - "

"But my dad had good reasons, too," she said. "He had a reputation. Constituents. A wife and family."

"You're not like him," Cisco said. "You are _not_ like him."

"I acted like him, though. I only thought about myself. The things I was scared of. What's the difference, really?"

She tore at the Kleenex. Little shreds drifted to the floor. She didn't have to be like her dad, she thought.

So she told him what she'd always wished her dad had said.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel that way, and I wish I hadn't. But I did. Is there a way you can forgive me?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, of course."

"No," she said. "Don't just say that because I'm standing here crying. I know how you are. But I hurt you."

He came to her and took the Kleenex out of her restless hands. He looked at the shredded wreck and tossed it at the trash basket. It missed. He reached over to the bookshelf and took another one and wiped her face. "You're not a mind reader. And I never said."

"I still shouldn't have made that condition. Or made it so - "

"Classified top secret?"

She nodded. "It was unfair."

"That's true. But you won't do it again, will you?"

She shook her head, mute. His nearness, his warmth soaked into her. She felt starved, like a flower that had gone weeks without sunlight.

"So, if I don't forgive you when you ask for it, who does it hurt, really?"

She took a few hiccuping breaths.

He managed a smile at her, a tight, wobbling thing, and wiped his own eyes with the same tissue.

"You matter," she said in a whisper. "To me. You do."

"Thank you," he said, and something about the way that he said it made her throat tighten up. "Look," he said. "Promise me something, okay?"

"What?"

"Don't beat yourself up about this," he said. "Okay? Forgive yourself. You screwed up. So what? People screw up. And you came to make it right, which not everybody does, so - Let yourself be happy with Ronnie, okay? Don't worry about me."

"Ronnie," she said.

"He would be a good boyfriend. You should go for it. I want you to have what you want, Caitlin."

Panic whipped through her chest. He cared about her, but he didn't want her. He didn't think they could be together. It was too broken; she'd messed up too much, just like she'd always known she would. She would spend the whole next semester with this frustrated longing gnawing away at her insides, watching him flirt with others, kiss them, go into his room with them, and know it was her own fault that -

She stopped. Breathed. _Looked._

He was smiling at her, his bright, supportive friend smile. But his eyes were miserable. Just as miserable as she felt.

And he'd been going to see her. Six hours in the dark to an unfamiliar city just so she would know she wasn't alone.

And he'd told her she mattered.

"What if I don't want that?"

The smile dissolved. "What?"

"You're assuming that Ronnie, as my boyfriend, is what I want. What if I don't?"

"But," he said blankly. "You like him. And - "

"Isn't this where we went wrong last time?"

He'd lost all words. His eyes were wide and full of wonder and dread.

"I do like Ronnie," she said. "I have for a long time. But when I saw him today - "

"Today?"

She nodded. "We've been texting all break. Today, we were going to hang out. But he came and we got coffee and I - I told him that I had no intention of dating him. And then I came here."

"But - you - you like him," Cisco said, his eyes dazed. "And you kissed him, and why would you not date him? Isn't that what you want?"

"I want _you,_ " she said.

He gulped air as if he were about to go underwater. "Me?"

"Yes." Her breath trembled in her lungs. "I don't know what you want. Maybe you just want me to go right now and and never come back - "

"No," he said very fast. "Please don't, I - "

They stood staring at each other. His fingers curled in the Kleenex.

"I want to start over again, Cisco," she said. "I want to do it right this time."

He shook his head. "No," he said.

Her breath went to stone in her throat and choked her.

"Oh god," he whispered. "I meant - I said that wrong. I don't want to start over b-because I don't wanna pretend like the way it happened never happened. Even though some things were awful, a lot of it was - awesome. Right? I mean, do you think so?"

"Yes," she said in a small voice, thinking about how patient and gentle he'd been as she was getting used to sex, how he'd made her laugh, how he would always smile when he saw her no matter where they were, how he'd introduced her to his friends. "A lot of it was - was wonderful."

"I don't want to forget about that. I want to fix what we messed up and go from there." He touched her face with shaking fingers. "Can we do that?"

She nodded, unable to speak, and he kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back like he was the air she'd struggled for. He pulled her close, his arms warm, his solid, familiar body strong against hers. She curled her fingers in his hair, greedy to touch him all the ways she'd missed touching him since she'd left school. She tasted salt and didn't know which one of them was crying and thought maybe it didn't matter.


	17. . . . Made Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're up-to-date as of last Friday, this is actually the second half of the previous chapter, cut out and put in its own section. I was thinking about tone and pacing and realized it actually needed to be its own. Don't worry. I'm putting up a new one tonight as well.

They had to pull apart to breathe. He was shaking, and he wiped her face with his thumb.

"I need another Kleenex, I think," she said and reached over for it, blowing her nose. She got another one and wiped his face, too. He rested his forehead against hers and sighed.

"Oh my god, I missed you," he said.

"Me too."

"I got a B in European History."

"You did?"

He nodded. "I so wanted to text you. I almost did. I typed it up and everything and then I deleted it and I put my phone in the bathroom all night so I wouldn't write it again."

"Why not?"

He rested his head on her shoulder a moment. "I felt - I felt like I didn't deserve to talk to you, or to - reach out - " He lifted his head. His eyes were wet again. "I hated what I said. I hated what I felt."

"I needed to hear it," she said. "I wish I hadn't heard it like that, but I did need to hear it."

"We won't do that again, okay? We'll talk. Promise me."

"We'll talk," she vowed. "I'm so sorry I shut you out. There were times I wanted to say something, just to share with you. But it was such a habit, to bury it, and - " She blinked hard.

"I shut you out too. You asked about my brother, and my family, and I would blow you off."

"When Barry told me about your grandma, he said you would get projects that distracted you for awhile. Like your car that wrecked the garage."

"Just the roof. Is there where that project thing came from?"

She nodded.

He bit his lip. "Did I make you feel like a pathetic virgin?"

She felt her eyes widen. "Oh, Cisco, no! That was me. That was all my insecurities. You never made me feel like that. You made me feel sexy. Beautiful. Normal."

He let out his breath. "You weren't a project."

"I know."

"But - I admit sometimes you were an escape."

She combed her fingers through the ends of his hair. "I know that too. And sometimes you were. It's okay. I'm okay being an escape, as long as I know that's what you're doing. Sometimes I'm going to need it, too."

"How long did you know about your dad's divorce? How long have you had to worry about it getting out?"

"November."

"Oh, baby," he said, pulling her close.

She buried her face in his hair, but mumbled, "I don't know about baby. As an endearment."

He kissed her ear. "Sweetie? Honey pie? Princess?"

"Ugh!"

He laughed softly. "We'll figure something out."

She snorted and kissed him again. It started out sweet, but his mouth opened, and she licked behind his upper lip, and his hand tightened in her sweater - "Caitlin, mm" - and she slipped her hands under the hem of his shirt and curled her fingers into his waistband.

Because she hadn't touched the boy she loved in over two weeks and honestly, she was _horny_.

He broke the kiss. "Okay, this feels kind of - but I really - " He let his breath out. "You wanna?"

"I really wanna," she said.

A smile bloomed over his face. "Okay. Hang on. One second." He broke away from her and went to the corner of his room, where a half-emptied duffel bag sat open.

She perched on the edge of his bed, watching him rummage. "Didn't you unpack?"

"I got my laundry," he said, unzipping a side pocket. "Man, where'd I put 'em?"

"What about everything else?"

"What's the point? I'm gonna repack everything in like two weeks anyway. Ha!" He pulled out a crumpled, crushed box of condoms. "I knew I still had some." He straightened up and stood for a moment, smiling at her.

She smiled back. "What?"

"I was just thinking," he said, crawling onto the bed and leaning in to drop kisses on her jaw, her cheek, her neck. "I really wish I could travel back through time and tell my incredibly horny and frustrated younger self that one day, the most amazing and beautiful girl in the world would be sitting on my bed, and yeah, she wants to do _that_."

She caught his face in her hands and kissed his mouth until they both gasped for air. "You're really thinking about your younger self right now?" she murmured.

"Mmm, good point. Time travel. I can do that whenever." He dropped the condoms next to them and pulled her into his lap.

She gripped his arms as they kissed, feeling the familiar heat crackle under her skin, combined with a tenderness that was brand-new.

"Oh," she breathed, burrowing closer. "Oh, I missed this."

He pressed his face into her hair for a moment. "You're not the only one."

He ran his hands down her sides and palmed her hips for a moment as he gently, gently, gently bit at her lower lip. Then he took the hem of her sweater and peeled it up, tugging it off over her head, smoothing down the Oxford shirt she wore under it. He ran his fingers through her wild, static-y hair. They caught in the barrette that held her hair back - "Ouch" "Sorry!" - and he unclipped it and set it on his nightstand, next to his glasses.

He undid the first button of her shirt, then dropped his head and kissed the hollow of her throat. He kept unbuttoning, following the path of his hands with his lips, until she lay flat on her back and he was nuzzling the tender skin of her belly, just above the button of her jeans. He ran his warm, gentle hands up her body and pushed the shirt open, then braced his arms on either side of her head and kissed her hotly.

She gripped his shoulders and arched up into him, feeling the soft slide of his t-shirt against the bare skin of her stomach and chest. He broke the kiss and rested his forehead against hers. Their breath whispered hot and humid between them. At this distance, she could see little stripes of gold in his eyes. He kissed her nose, and she smiled, and nudged him until he sat up.

She sat up, too, letting her shirt slide down off her arms. She reached behind herself to undo her bra.

"Let me."

"Really? Everything?"

"I always kind of wanted to peel all your clothes off, incredibly slowly," he said, dropping a kiss on the curve of her shoulder as he crawled around behind her to get the clasp. "Never got around to it." He had to fuss with it for a moment - honestly, he was terrible at that and always had been. She tipped her head forward, pulling her hair out of the way, biting her lip against the smile, and waited until her bra loosened. "Yesss," he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss the arch of her neck as his warm hands slipped under the nylon around to the front and cupped her breasts.

She reached back to hold his face so she could kiss him as his thumbs worked over her nipples, coaxing gasps from her. After a good long time like that, he tugged her bra off, sliding the straps down her arms. She let it fall in her lap and then tossed it over the side of the bed. He slid both hands down toward the button of her jeans and undid them, pulling the zipper down. She pushed her hips into his hand and his fingers snuck into her open fly to cup her through her panties.

She bit her lip and covered his hand with hers.

He groaned into her ear.

"How slowly?" she asked him.

"Maybe not that slowly," he said, and pushed her pants down.

She had to go up on her knees to get them down further, and then settle back against him and kick them off, toeing off her pretty ballet flats at the same time. She rested her head back on his shoulder and reveled in his hands, running over her from shoulders to thighs.

She turned and kissed him, curling her naked legs up and framing his face with her hands. His arms wrapped around her waist as he kissed her back.

She trailed her hands down to his belt and whispered, "My turn," as she undid it. His eyes slid half-closed and his mouth fell open as she ran her hand over the length of his dick, pressing up against his zipper. She pulled the zipper down and spread the fly open, stroking him again. He mumbled her name, pressing kisses to her ear, her jaw, her neck. She tugged his pants down his legs, and had to pause to take off his shoes and socks before she peeled his pants all the way off and let them fall to the floor.

He curled his toes into his bedspread. "Sorry," he said. "Stinky."

"Not that bad," she said, and gave his knee a kiss on her way back up to pull down his boxers. When they'd followed his pants to the floor, she cupped his ankles and ran her hands all the way back up his legs, the hair prickling against her palms. She kissed his shin, his kneecap, his thigh, and brushed her lips over his hipbone, pushing the hem of his long-sleeved shirt up to do so. He ran his hand over her hair, combing it back from her face, and she looked up at him tenderly before pressing her lips to the tip of his dick. He whimpered a little. "Caitlin - "

She straddled his thighs and put her hands under the hem of his shirt, giving him little scritches with her nails and feeling him shudder with the sensation. He kissed the hollow of her throat, but lifted his head when she started to push his shirt up over his stomach, his chest, his head, his arms, up and off and onto the floor with his other clothes.

And then it was just them, no cloth, just skin and hands and lips, his fingers ghosting over the sensitive spot at her waist and making her whimper, her rubbing his ever-so-faintly rough jaw with her thumb, the ends of his hair sliding over the curve of her shoulder as he sucked at the curve of her neck, her hips moving against his so the wetness at her center seeped over the base of his erection, and the tip rubbed her stomach and his.

She wrapped her arms around her neck and rested against him, cheek pressed to his, just feeling for a moment. His fingers traced patterns on her shoulder blade, mysterious hieroglyphics.

"Condom," he mumbled into her shoulder.

"Yes," she said, and stretched out her hand, patting around on the bed for it without letting go of him any more than she absolutely had to.

They got it on, and she rose up on her knees as he maneuvered his cock into position so she could slide down onto him, taking him deep - "Oh, god, _oh god_ ," one of them moaned, or maybe both of them, it was hard to say.

She rested her face in his hair, letting herself feel again, the thickness of him, the closeness, the shudder of his breath against her cheek. She shifted her hips and squeezed with her inner muscle and his breath hitched.

They kissed open-mouthed, soft, sloppy, fingers twining in each others' hair, palms sliding over skin, as they moved together. He supported her with his palm between her shoulder blades when she leaned back so he could kiss her breasts, licking her nipples like the top of an ice cream sundae. She leaned in again, wrapping herself all around him, hooking her leg behind his back, and let herself fall into the sensations.

But mixed in the sensations were all her rollercoaster feelings, swimming around inside her, and she began to tremble as they spilled out. This boy, in her arms, she loved him. She loved him so much. He was so important to her. Nobody should be that important, nobody should be able to hurt you that much.

She felt peeled; she felt raw. This was too much. She was all exposed nerve, too much, too intimate, too close -

His hand tightened on her hip, and when she opened her damp eyes and looked into his, they looked as lost and fearful as she felt. As if he were peeled too. She cupped his face in her hand and pressed her lips to his, and he kissed her back, mumbling her name against her mouth.

_You matter_ , he'd told her. He'd told her first, when he'd thought she wanted to be with Ronnie. How much courage must that have taken?

"Cisco, Cisco," she breathed, and let herself relax against him again. There were tears in her eyes and her breath was hiccuping in her lungs but it was okay. With him it was okay, because his lips trembled when he kissed her. They could be shaky and scared, and it was all right as long as they were together.

She felt his climax coming in the way his arm tightened around her and he dropped one hand down to brace himself against the bed so he could fuck up into her harder. She knew the signs, now, and he knew hers. When she shifted her legs, he paused to help her so she could grind down on his cock that much harder, change the angle, chasing the end.

She almost didn't want to - why couldn't they be like this forever? - but she was pushing herself and him toward orgasm like the edge of a waterfall, going faster every moment -

When she shot over the edge, she muffled her wail in his hair. Barely a moment later, while pleasure still buffeted her, he moaned against her neck and his back arched hard. They held each other tight through the storm.

When it had passed, they melted into each other for the space of three panted breaths, their hearts slamming against each others' chests. He sighed deeply and smoothed his hand down her spine. She kissed his hair.

They eased each other down to the mattress, still wrapped around each other. She rubbed her thumb over the spot on his shoulder where her nails had dug in, and twined her legs with his. Every so often, he would purse his lips just enough to press a tiny kiss to the same spot on her shoulder.

After a long, lovely, floating time, he shifted enough to pull out of her and take care of the condom, but no further than he had to. He wrapped the knotted condom in a Kleenex and threw it at the trash can, and it actually made it in. He cheered himself with a fist pumped in the air, and she buried her head in his shoulder, giggling.

He put his arms back around her, pulling her close.

"Bare told me something," he said quietly.

"Oh?"

"He said it was different when you were in love. I made fun of him."

She angled her head so she could look at him. "But he was right," she said.

He smiled dreamily. "Yeah."

She touched his face, and he turned into her hand. "You love me," she said wonderingly.

"You love me," he whispered back, with the same awe.

She'd thought for years what it would be like for someone to love her. She hadn't known it would be like this; that their heart would be an egg in the palm of her hand, that she couldn't be careless with it; she couldn't think only about herself and forget about its safety. She curled around him again, careful, tender.

His hand smoothed down her spine and he whispered something soft and indistinct, holding her as gently as if she might break, too.


	18. . . . Opened Up So Far

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? I told you there would be a new chapter.

A long time later, she stirred. He snuggled her closer, but she put her hand against his chest, and he opened his eyes. "You okay?"

She stared into his face, anxiety knotting up her stomach. "How much do you know about my parents?"

He studied her, face tightening, and then he said quietly, "The wikipedia entry on your dad. And the articles that were linked to it. And some stuff that Iris had printed out."

"Iris?"

"She got the, um, your dad as a topic for a final."

"The project. The one she had to change. That's how you found out?"

"Yeah." He watched her, his eyes dark with seriousness, waiting for what she would say next.

"Why didn't you say anything?" she asked.

He worked his fingers through her hair. "Barry convinced us not to. He said you hadn't told us yourself, and you'd changed your name, and gone far away, and obviously you just wanted to get away from it."

"He was right. How did he know that?"

"He - uh - he went through something similar when he was a kid."

"Oh," she said, thinking about that. Barry always seemed so chipper and positive. Finding out he had a skeleton in his closet too made her wonder what else she'd missed. Maybe they could talk about it. Someday. When they were better friends. When he wanted her to know.

Cisco touched a kiss to her forehead. "Caitlin, about your parents, you don't have to - "

"I want to tell you about it, though," she said, hearing her voice shake. "I want to."

He smoothed her hair over her shoulder. "Okay. I'm listening."

She stared at his ceiling. She didn't know where to start.

"My mom was married when she met my dad," she said, picking something that felt random. "His name was Carl Smoak. He's listed on our birth certificates. But he left when I was a baby."

"Did you ever see him?"

"No. I don't remember him. Felicity does, a little." She smoothed the sheet. "I remember my dad more. He used to come to the house for meetings. That's what they called it. I mean, my mom worked in politics. She had a lot of meetings, and a lot of them were at the house because politics is like that. But they were different when it was him. When he was there, he would play with us, or bring us presents. When we were bigger, he'd ask about school or our homework or our friends before he went upstairs with Mom."

She and Felicity would curl up downstairs, in the basement, working on homework or watching TV, knowing without talking about it that they wouldn't go back upstairs until they heard the front door shut.

"Did you know?"

She nodded. "We were allowed to call him Daddy, or Dad, in the house when it was just us. But when he brought someone with him, or we saw him outside the house, at events and things, we were supposed to call him Senator McDonnell and shake his hand."

"That's - " Words seemed to fail him.

"It didn't feel weird. Little kids are like that. They can get used to anything and it doesn't feel weird until you think about it later. I slipped up a few times, but that was when I was so little that everyone was like, 'ha ha, how cute, she calls everyone Daddy.'" She smoothed her hand over the sheet again. "One time, when I was about four, was in front of his fiancee."

"You think she knew?"

"Maybe. I don't know. They got married anyway. They had Paul when I was six, and Ethan when I was eight."

"Did you know your brothers?"

"They weren't my brothers. Mom told me not to talk to them, and so did Felicity, so I didn't. After they were born, Dad didn't come around as much. One time - I think after Ethan was born - he didn't come see us for six months, and when he did come, he explained that it was because he had two little babies now and babies made people busy. We smiled and said that was okay."

"Why?"

"It was what we were supposed to say. It's the same thing Mom said when he told her he couldn't see her for awhile because he was going out of town or on vacation or something. That's fine, that's okay." She crumpled up the sheet. "When I was twelve, we were at something - some event. I don't remember what. I saw Ethan fall and scrape his knee, and he screamed. And our dad came right over and picked him up and kissed him, and wiped his knee off. In front of everybody. And Ethan called him Daddy and nobody corrected him and - " She was crying now. "And then I realized that he was our dad, but Felicity and I weren't his family."

He swore under his breath and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, kissing her hair until her breathing steadied. Then he asked, "What did he tell you when, you know, it all happened? What the hell did he say?"

She ducked her head against his chest and stared down at her own fingers, twisting in the sheet. "He didn't say anything. He never came again. That was it. My dad just - just removed himself from our lives."

She remembered checking her phone obsessively in the first days of the scandal, checking her email as her father denied on live television that he'd ever had a personal relationship with "that woman," never even mentioning herself or Felicity unless it was to scornfully deny anything but a distant well-wishing for the children of a friend.

He'd never sent her an email or a text before, but she'd thought,  _Maybe, maybe he'll write and say why he had to say those things._

She would take their mother's phone and hold it, hoping for a text or a phone call to come through labeled "Don" - what her mom called him. Nothing ever did, although the phone buzzed and shook with other contacts. Reporters. Oprah. Tabloids. TMZ. Playboy, even.

When they'd moved to Chicago, she'd stormed tearfully that he needed their new phone numbers, their new address, or how would he find them? Even while she sobbed, she knew he wouldn't try.

Cisco's arms tightened around her, and she realized she was crying again. "That's not -" He choked. "Jesus, Caitlin. That's not a dad. That's not the way a dad behaves."

"He wasn't completely bad," she said faintly. "You can't think that. He gave me wonderful birthday presents and he was thrilled that I had such good grades, and - and - " The way he smelled when he hugged her. She could still remember that.

"And when push came to shove, he bailed. So as far I'm concerned, he forfeits the dad title, okay? Not having a dad at all is better than that."

"Try it," she snarled. _"Try it."_

He blinked at her. "I'm sorry." He kissed her forehead. "I'm sorry. I'm being all - I just - things with my pop haven't always been perfect, but I can't imagine him ever acting like that and - I'm sorry. I'll shut up."

She settled back into his arms. "I know you're just angry on my behalf but it's not that simple. He's the only dad I've ever had." She sniffed. "I spent a lot of time thinking that if Felicity and I had been boys, or we weren't Jewish, or if I was prettier or smarter or could talk to people easier, if things would be different."

"Look," he said. "Look, you can really screw up your head thinking if you could just be different. If you could look different or talk different or like different things. You'll make yourself crazy like that."

"I know that. Even then I knew that, but it didn't stop me from thinking it."

"Yeah, I know, I get it." He kissed her hair. "I'm so sorry."

She let out a shuddering breath and burrowed into him. She'd never told anyone the whole ugly story. It felt like a knot had come undone in her chest. It still hurt, but the pain was looser, more diffuse. As if it was starting to settle in.

"When I go back to school," she said quietly, "I want to find somebody I can talk to."

"Like a therapist?"

She nodded. "This has ruined my life long enough."

"Barry goes to see somebody every other week. Maybe he could, like, refer you or whatever."

"That would be good," she said. "He could tell me how they are."

"And in the meantime, I, um, I can listen. Anytime you want."

She kissed him, thinking that she didn't deserve this second chance, but that she would take it anyway. "So can I," she said. "Will you tell me what happened last summer?"

His face changed. Surprise and consternation and apprehension chased themselves across his expression. He took a deep breath and let it out. "Um. I - Wait," he said. "Wait here a moment." He climbed out of bed and crouched over his pants, lying on the floor. He fished through the cloth until he found his phone, and then got back into bed next to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. "Okay," he said, swiping his phone awake and navigating to his pictures. "Okay. This, um, this is my nana."

The picture was of Cisco, clearly at his high-school graduation, his mortarboard askew because his cheek was pressed close to the older women with the spiky maroon hair, both of them grinning identical high-beam grins.

"She looks like you." His dark eyes, the quirk of his eyebrows, the shape of his nose, the round apples of his cheeks. And of course, that brilliant smile. His grandmother's face folded easily into wrinkles along the path of her smile, as if, like her grandson, she'd spent a lot of her life laughing.

She realized with a jolt that Cisco's face would do that, too, in about forty years.

"Yep," he said. "Her name was Maria Angelica Francisca Suarez."

"Francisca?"

He nodded again. "My mom is her only daughter," he said. "And what you do, see, is you name your first girl baby after her abuelitas. I mean, people don't do that so much anymore, but my mom likes traditions like that. But she and my pop wanted to stop with two. So they took one of Nana's names for me." He grinned briefly. "I almost got named Angel."

"I can't see you as an Angel."

"Yeah, me neither. She was smart," he said. "She was a math teacher for years. We still sometimes get people who stop by and say they graduated 'cuz of her. She'd teach them in Spanish even though she wasn't s'posed to, and go talk to their parents about tutoring and summer school and stuff. I guess I was her baby, sort of, because when my mom went back to school to be a paralegal, I spent a lot of time at my nana and tata's. So she taught me numbers and letters and took me to the library for storytime and stuff. And she was the first person to tell me it was okay that I liked boys and girls both - that I wasn't gonna die of AIDS and I wasn't gonna go to hell and she loved me no matter what."

Caitlin went rigid. "People told you that you were going to Hell?"

"Not my folks," he said. "They were really damn weirded out though, and there were some cousins that - anyway, Nana said they were wrong, and she kept saying it, and that was huge, when I was fourteen."

"She sounds amazing."

"She was." He rested his head back against the wall, looking at the picture.

She reached up and curled her fingers around his free hand. "What happened?"

"Around June," he said in a voice that crackled like he'd been gargling gravel, "my pop finally talked her into going to the doctor. She'd been having stomach troubles. Said she was getting old, that was all. But she got tired of all us nagging her, and went."

She pressed her cheek to his shoulder. "What was it?"

"Pancreatic cancer. Stage four."

She gasped. Pancreatic cancer was a vicious, fast-moving cancer to begin with, and for it to have gotten all the way to stage four before anybody caught it -

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I don't have any pictures of her after July 4th because I - I don't want to remember her that way." He squeezed his eyes tight, but tears gleamed at the seam of his lids anyway.

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him everywhere she could reach. He held her tight, his phone pressing into her back.

"She died on the second of August and I - I was relieved. I was actually _relieved._ "

"She was in pain," Caitlin said, tears stinging her own eyes. "You loved her and she was so terribly sick, and you couldn't do anything, and she was in pain. Of course you were relieved. Of course you were."

"It wasn't just - I wanted to get back to school so bad." His embrace loosened, but she stayed close, burrowed into his chest, feeling the vibrations of his voice against her cheek. "I didn't want to be home. My mama was a mess, and everybody was just sort of shell-shocked, and some people didn't want to talk about her at all, like she never existed, and some people wanted to talk about her all the time, and I don't know which was worse. I couldn't stand it. I wanted to be gone."

"That's okay. That's natural."

"About a week after the funeral, Dante came to me and said somebody needed to look after Granpa. He wasn't eating, and he wasn't sleeping, and he wasn't cleaning himself - we all knew he was falling apart, and we were trying to keep an eye on him, but somebody needed to be there. Like, in the house. With him. Dante said it should be me, because I'd always been Nana's pet and I was the youngest cousin, and everybody else was working and had families and stuff."

"But - school."

"Yeah. I should put off a semester. Or transfer to the U here in town. I said hell, no. We had the worst fight we've ever had. He said I was a selfish little brat who never thought about anything but myself. I told him he was wasting his life fucking around on a keyboard and why didn't he grow the fuck up and get a real job."

"Oh, god," she said.

"Mama and Pop had asked him to do it, see," he told her. "Help Granpa. But there was, like, this tour. His band was in the running to maybe be the opening act for this tour. Not anybody huge, but it was a pretty big deal for them."

"What happened?"

"I came back to school, and Dante moved in with Granpa, and he took care of him until just after Halloween, when Mama and Pop finally convinced the stubborn old fart to sell the house and move into this house."

"But you were still fighting."

"I felt like a turd. Dante gave it up. His chance. His shot. Music's different than engineering. You don't get your degree and then submit your resume places to be a rock star. Like, I could have deferred a semester. Family obligations. It's a thing, CCU is fine with that. Or transferred. The university here in town is pretty okay. I mean, not as good as CCU but it's a good program. I coulda done it."

She traced circles on his shoulder. "What happened with the tour?"

"The band tried out without him. They sorta tanked it. Somebody else got the gig. So, I didn't just ruin Dante's chance, I ruined theirs, too."

"They could've tanked with him, you know."

"Yeah."

"Or someone else could've just been better."

"Yeah."

"Or, they could've gotten it and had a terrible time on tour and never gotten anything ever again."

"I guess."

"Or the tour bus could've gone off a cliff and killed everybody aboard in a fiery inferno."

He leaned back on his elbows and crunched up his face at her. "What?"

"I'm saying! You don't know what would have happened. Don't take all the blame on your shoulders."

He looked away. "I know, I know, but I - he's still at a job he hates. He thought he'd get to quit last summer, and he's still there."

She said, "We talked a little, you know. While I was waiting for you? He was telling me, he's been playing a lot of solo gigs lately, and he took a music theory class at the university last semester. He wants to try composing some things. He's got an app on his phone."

"What? I didn't hear that."

She nodded. "I doubt this is the last chance he will ever, ever have, Cisco. You went back to school because that's what you needed to do. And no matter what you tell yourself, you didn't force Dante to move in with your grandfather. He chose to do it. Your grandfather is okay now, right?"

"Better. Yeah. He's good enough that my folks can keep an eye on him and still work like normal while he's living here."

"Okay. So. And you and your brother worked it out, right?"

"Yeah."

"So." She slid her arms around him. "Don't beat yourself up. Things worked out the way they were supposed to."

He nuzzled her cheek. "I have such a smart girlfriend." At the look on her face, he said, 'What?"

"That's so weird," she said. "I'm your girlfriend."

He grinned at her. "My ma's got a labelmaker. I can stick a label on your forehead until you get used to it."

"Nooo!"

"Hey, I'll do it too!" He poked his forehead. "Right here. Boyfriend."

She pressed her hands to her face to suppress the giggles. "Don't you dare!"

He kissed her neck, laughing into her skin as he rolled on top of her.

A knock thundered at the door. "Hey, you guys better be done in there, because Ma just texted she's at Boston Market and what do we want."

Cisco sat straight up. "Shit!"


	19. . . . Met the Family

"What is it?"

He was out of bed, scrambling for his clothes. "Boston Market's around the corner. If she's just right now ordering, we've got like ten minutes max before she and Granpa are back. Here." He tossed her sweater into her lap.

"Cisco, it's okay!" she said. "Remember? I don't want to keep us a secret anymore. I want everyone to know."

He climbed onto the bed in his boxers, one arm in and one arm out of his shirt. He framed her face with his hands. "I love you," he said tenderly. "I love you so much and I can't wait for everyone, the world, to know we're together. But it's a biiiiiig difference between the world figuring I'm having sex with you because you're my girlfriend, and _my mom_ knowing I'm having sex with you because you're _bare-ass naked in my bedroom_."

Her eyes went wide. "Oh!"

"Yes!"

She hurled the blanket aside. "Where the hell is my bra?"

They threw their clothes at each other across the bed. She scrambled into her pants and fumbled with the buttons of her shirt, misbuttoning them by one the first time, and then having to undo them all. "Tell the truth, my makeup is a mess, isn't it? There's no way I have any lipstick left on my mouth."

"It's fine," he said, buttoning her shirt for her. He kissed her. "You don't need it. You're beautiful."

She yanked her sweater on and finger-combed her hair, wincing when her fingers caught in snags. "It's not that, I'm such a mess. I don't even have any powder, it's all in my purse and my purse is in the kitchen - "

"We'll go get it. Come on." He dragged her out of the room and down the hall just in time for his mom to walk in the front door.

She was a strong-featured woman, with curly, dark-brown hair speckled with grey and gold earrings swinging at her ears. She had one big brown paper bag in each hand and was saying over her shoulder. " - I don't think so, Daddy, her car is older and - " She caught sight of them and stopped.

"Hi, Mama," Cisco said brightly.

"Hi," she said, and her dark eyes - Cisco's eyes - flicked down to where their hands were entwined. Caitlin felt like every button was unbuttoned and her hair was tousled beyond redemption.

"This is Caitlin," Cisco added. "She's my girlfriend. And this is my mom." He gestured.

"Paulina Ramon," she said. "It's - it's Caitlin?"

"Yes. Snow. Caitlin Snow," she said shakily, putting her hand out to shake before realizing that the older woman's hands were still full. "Um. It's nice to meet you."

"You too. Is that your car out front?"

"Is it in the way?"

"No, we were just trying to figure out - but that question's answered, I guess."

Cisco added quickly, "And my granpa. There. Behind her."

"Who's this?" he asked. He had Cisco's broad shoulders, and carefully combed pure white hair, and unexpectedly blue eyes under eyebrows like caterpillars gone rogue.

"My girlfriend," Cisco said. "Caitlin."

"Tienes una enamorada?"

"Ingles, por favor, Granpa."

"No habla Español?" the old man asked her.

"Ummmm - " She took an educated guess at what he'd said. "It's okay as long as I can get a translation." She'd been introduced to a lot of politicians and ambassadors when she was younger, waiting while polite greetings and introductions were translated from English to Japanese or Arabic or Russian, and then back again. This would be just like that, right?

Eeep.

"Perdon," he said. "Sorry. I forget." His face crunched up. "My brain. I don't always think in English. I'm Mr. Suarez."

"Hi," she said. "It's nice to meet you."

Paulina shifted her weight. "Well, Caitlin, we're going to have dinner in about ten minutes here - "

"Oh, of course! I understand. I should probably get going anyway. "

Paulina frowned a little. "Actually, I meant, do you want to stay?"

"Oh," Caitlin said. "Is there enough? I don't want to impose."

"There's plenty. We always get too much. You're not vegetarian, are you?"

"No. Thank you. Dinner would be nice."

She nodded, looking back at Cisco. "Okay. Well. I'll take these to the kitchen, then."

Everyone cleared out, leaving behind a smell of chicken, and Caitlin and Cisco wilted against each other.

"Man, I'm so sorry," Cisco muttered. "You've been my girlfriend for, like, an hour and you already had to meet the fam."

"It's okay," she said. "I'm fine. I was fine."

He gave her a look and held up their still-joined hands. "How come I can't feel my fingers anymore?"

"Oh!" She let go, and he hugged her before taking her hand again.

"Don't get freaked out. Mama was just surprised. But my parents have kind of learned to roll with the punches when it comes to me."

She worried her bottom lip. "Should I go help with dinner?"

"Yeah, let's." He tugged her along into the kitchen.

His mom was at the counter, mixing up some kind of milky-looking drink in a big pitcher. "Daddy, I don't know, it's Cisco - " She broke off when they came in. "Oh, hi, baby."

"Hi, Mama," he said. "Caitlin wanted to help."

Paulina looked at her. "Thank you. Can you unpack the bags and set everything out on the table?"

"Of course. Yes." She focused on the task, placing the plastic containers of chicken and meatloaf in the center, and then arranging the side dishes around it.

Cisco and Dante circled around each other, setting the table. Cisco checked out the food that Caitlin was setting out. "Oh my god, Mama, you got that nasty creamed spinach?"

"Well you didn't text me back," she said.

"That's _my_ creamed spinach," his grandfather said.

"And 'Nando's," Paulina told him.

"Only if he gets here in time to eat it."

"I got enough for both of you, Daddy, don't get greedy. Cisquito - "

"Maaaaa," he moaned while Caitlin ducked her head to hide her smile.

"Cisco, sorry, can you bring me the mac and cheese? And I got you the apples, see?"

"Oh, okay." He took her the container and kissed her cheek. "Thank you."

"Mama, we need another chair," Dante said.

"Well, go get a folding one," she said, stirring extra cheese and what looked like canned jalapenos into the mac and cheese.

"You moved them."

"Are there spoons?" Caitlin asked Cisco, and he got a fistful of serving spoons out of the drawer.

"They're in the same place," Paulina said to Dante.

"No, they're not, I looked!"

"Well, look again!"

He came back with one, saying, "Okaaayyyyyy," when his mother smirked at him, and wedged it into the corner.

Caitlin claimed it, and Cisco said, "Hey - "

"It's okay, I like it," she said.

He sat next to her and their knees bumped every so often, not always by accident. He smiled at her and took her hand under the table for a moment. She squeezed it and let go.

"Okay, we're almost ready," Paulina said, bringing the pitcher to the table. "Caitlin, what do you want to drink?"

"Anything's fine," she said.

"We got water, juice, soda, iced tea, and this is horchata - you had horchata before?"

"Um. No? But I can try some."

"It's sorta like rice milk with cinnamon and stuff," Cisco said, pouring himself a glass. "It's good."

"¿Donde estan?" someone called from the living room.

"Aqui!" Cisco's mother called back from her spot at the fridge, where she was retrieving the other drinks.

A man with untidy grey hair came in, wearing scrubs and glasses. He put his arms around her from behind and kissed her cheek. "Mmm," he said, sniffing the air. "Home cooking. So much better than my wife's."

Caitlin stiffened, but Cisco's mom snorted and jabbed her elbow back into his stomach. "Just for that, I'm letting Daddy eat all your nasty spinach."

"Uhoh," he said, and kissed her again.

"God, you guys, stop grossing out my company," Cisco said loudly, and his dad looked around.

"Who's this?" he asked, letting go of his wife and coming over to the table.

Caitlin managed to stand up. "Hi," she said stiffly. "I - I'm - "

"Dad, this is Caitlin," Cisco said. "She's my girlfriend."

His brows went up, but he took the hand she stuck out as calmly as if he met strange girls in his kitchen all the time. "Well, hi. I'm Fernando Ramon." He had kind eyes, light brown and surrounded by friendly crinkles.

"Caitlin Snow," she mumbled, shaking it and sitting back down quickly. "It's nice to meet you."

"You too. I'm going to wash up and change. Be right back." He paused by his wife and murmured something in Spanish. She gave him a speaking look and a who-knows kind of shrug.

He was back by the time everything was set out, wearing beat-up jeans and a t-shirt that said Mordor Fun Run, which Caitlin thought was probably a Lord of the Rings reference and also that it meant that Cisco had come by his nerdy tastes honestly.

The food got passed around. Their grandfather was accused of hoarding the cornbread. He loudly said everyone got a cornbread, was there anybody who didn't get a cornbread? and Paulina laughed and said, "Daddy, who was it who said we should get extra because the boys were home?"

She was a paralegal, Caitlin gathered, and Fernando was an ER nurse at a big hospital. Dante worked part-time at a hardware store when he wasn't playing music. She'd wondered if she would hear the mix of Spanish and English that Cisco had used on the phone with his dad, the day she'd studied in his room, but apparently in deference to her, they all used English.

She ate quietly, watching them talk to each other, listening to the shift and weave of this family with all its unspoken, wordless history. The affectionate way their grandfather looked at his daughter when she teased him, the way Fernando's eyes, as tired as they were, crinkled up further when Dante said something that made him laugh.

Cisco had been with her at too many parties to try to drag her into the conversation, but he would touch her knee every often, a silent _hey-you-okay_ , and she would give him a little _yes_ smile.

She _was_ okay, enough that when his mom started asking getting-to-know-you kind of questions about her major and her future plans, she answered them easily. His dad suggested volunteering at a public clinic over the summer, to give her a taste of what it was like, actually working with people. She nodded and said she'd consider that.

She'd told them she was staying with her sister, and they'd all finished exclaiming over the long drive she'd made today when Paulina asked, "What about your parents?"

She stared at her plate. Her heart thudded in her throat.

Cisco put his glass down without taking a drink.

"Do they live in Starling City, too?"

It was a reasonable question. Any other girl could answer that question, no problem. She swallowed. "No. My mother lives in Chicago."

"Chicago, that's a nice town. What does she do?"

"She's - she writes freelance. About politics." Under a pen name, but she'd carved out a reputation with that name, one not associated with sex and scandal.

"And your daddy?"

Cisco went rigid, and said loudly, "Granpa, stop hoarding the cornbreads, some of us want them."

"Hey, get your hands off," his granpa said, whacking his fingers. "Mine."

"Cisco!" his dad said. "You interrupted Caitlin."

"I - "

She put her hand over his. "It's okay."

He glanced at her, a crinkle of worry between his brows.

"It is," she said. "I have to get used to being honest about it." She looked back at his family. "My father is Senator Gordon McDonnell. And my mother is Anna Smoak."

"Oh," his mom said faintly, and then nobody said anything.

Caitlin felt her face heat, slowly. She looked at her plate again, swallowing. God. This was so awkward. Why had she thought such brash honesty was a good idea? Cisco's family didn't want him to have a girlfriend with such a sordid family history. They -

"So," Paulina said in a high-pitched voice. "You grew up in Washington, D.C.?"

Caitlin looked up again. "What?"

"You grew up in D.C?" Paulina asked again, her voice almost creaking from the strain.

Caitlin twisted her napkin in her lap, trying to figure out what was going on. They weren't - ignoring it exactly, but they weren't - asking her about it either? "Well, the D.C. area, really," she said finally. "Alexandria, if you want to be technical, until I was fourteen and then - and then we moved to Chicago."

"D.C.'s nice," his mom said in that too-bright voice. "We went on a trip there when the boys were little. Remember that, 'Nando?"

He nodded a hair too fast. "Cisco got lost in the National Air and Space Museum."

"I didn't get lost," Cisco said, as if he'd said it a million times already. "You guys were just going too fast and I wanted to look at things." His voice was pitch perfect, indignant, breezy, but under the table, his hand wrapped around hers.

"You know, I don't think we got to half the places we planned to on that trip."

"There's a lot," Caitlin said faintly. "A lot to see, in D.C."

They managed awkward talk about Washington D.C.'s many tourist attractions until Caitlin felt like it wouldn't be too strange to ask Dante about where he was playing next. The conversation softened, relaxed, and became easy again. Caitlin let it swim around her, concentrating on breathing and the press of Cisco's knee against hers.

"You get a cornbread, baby?"

She looked up at Cisco's grandfather.

He pushed the plate at her. "Here. Have a cornbread."

"Thank you," she said, and took one.

* * *

Cisco knocked at his parents' bedroom door, and when his mom called out, "Come on in," pushed it open.

His mom was sitting up in bed, her glasses on the end of her nose, reflecting back the computer screen. She looked up and said, "Hey, baby. You need your computer back?"

"Hi, Mama." He sat cross-legged at the end of the bed. "No, it's good, you finish up. Pop asleep?"

She looked over at his pop, sprawled face-down on the other half of the bed. "Or comatose. Ay Dios, I keep telling him not to take those twelve-hour shifts." She patted her husband's hair, and he snorted a little and turned his face to the side, making little smacking noises before settling down again.

Cisco had always known his parents loved each other, but suddenly he remembered it again. He'd never categorized it with what you saw in the movies or what people sang about. It was different, in his mind.

But somehow, looking at his mama's face as she looked at his pop sleeping, Cisco realized that there must have been a time where they fell in love, and a time before they fell in love, and almost three decades between that time and now and -

It felt almost Grand-Canyon big to think about.

She looked back at him and became just his mama with her makeup off and her glasses on and her earrings and bracelets sitting on the bureau a few feet away. "Did you just come in to say good night, then?"

"Yeah, and plus to say thanks for, you know. Rolling with an unexpected guest and everything."

"Oh, well, it was fine. We had plenty of food."

"You like her?"

"Es dulce," his mama said. "Shyer than I ever pictured you with."

Cisco opened his mouth to say, _But hey, at least she's a girl, right? That's gotta be a relief!_

Then he closed it again. Maybe his parents were relieved he was with a girl, but so what? It didn't change how he felt about her, and he thought, _You know what, I'm just not, tonight._

His parents might still be a little squicky around the queer thing, but at least they'd never pretended he didn't _exist_. The last time he'd kissed a boy in front of them, they'd smiled only a little awkwardly, which was way better than it had been once. Honestly, Cisco had it okay, as far as parents went.

"Yeah, she's definitely different," he said instead. "But she's - I love her."

"I know," his mama said.

"I mean, I really love her, Mama," he said insistently. "Like, capital-L, like love. La quiero."

She put the computer down on the bed and reached out to touch his face. "Baby," she said. "Yo se. You've never looked at anybody like you look at her. And she loves you. That's lucky, for both of you."

"I know." He traced the pattern on the bedspread, which was new since summer. "And, um, thanks too for being so chill about the . . . her-parents thing."

His mama blew out her breath. " _That_ was unexpected."

"In case you're wondering, her dad isn't getting a divorce so he can go be with her mom."

"I didn't ask, honey."

"Yeah, but you're wondering."

"But I didn't ask."

"She's not used to telling people. Anybody. At all. So that was big for her, that she said something. So, can you guys - "

She raised her brows, the look on her face broadcasting _You'd better not say what you're about to be saying._

"- yeah," he finished up. "It's cool. I know you won't."

She nodded a little. "It's a big secret to carry all on your own."

"Yep."

"Was that what your fight was about?"

"That plus other things. Yeah." He made a face. "I've never had a fight that bad with somebody and still wanted to fix it. And it's never been so hard to fix. And I - I feel like we're still sort of in the middle of fixing it. Like we'll be doing it for a little while still." He looked at her anxiously. "Is that, like, a bad sign?"

"That's a really good sign, baby. I've been married to your daddy twenty-five years. We've fought about more and stupider things than you can imagine, and so far we've always managed to patch up, but it's never instantaneous. The movies don't show you that, do they?"

"Nnnnnnope," he said. "It's always falling into each others' arms and riding into the sunset."

"Hunh. Trust me, after the sunset, they better have had some hard discussions."

He grinned a little. "Thanks for letting her stay tonight, too."

"Like I'm going to let a girl your age go driving off by herself in the dark to Starling City. Or stay in a hotel. Madre de Dios."

It had taken some convincing, but Caitlin had finally agreed to leave for Starling City in the morning. She was sleeping in his room, and he'd been exiled to the couch. "It's not that she didn't want to stay, you know, but she's pretty used to taking care of herself. I've got to get her used to me taking care of her sometimes too."

His mama smiled at him. "I think you will."

He smiled back and hopped to his feet. "Okay. Shower's off, so my turn."

"Cisco," she called out as he headed for the door.

"Hmmm?"

"Your nalgas stay on that couch tonight. Don't you even think of sneaking into your room."

"Mama!"

"You have unlimited texts. You can send her e-mochis or whatever all night long, but don't you stick your big toe through your door."

"It's emojis."

She gave him a look over the tops of her glasses. "I'm not stupid, mijito. I know what you two were up to in your room before you came bounding out with those big innocent eyes, all 'Hiiiii Mamaaaaaaaa.' And I know what's probably going to happen as often as possible when you two go back to school."

He covered his eyes with his hands. "Agh. Please. Stop."

"And I trust that you're safe and smart when you do that. But still, it's not going to happen while I'm under the same roof, entiendes?"

He rolled his eyes. "Good night, Mama."

"Entiendes?" she called out.

"Entiendo," he said, and shut the door behind him.


	20. . . . Been in Love

Caitlin folded the last of her clothes into her drawers and shut them. She checked her phone, which had buzzed a few times, and found a few texts waiting. One from Barry, with the name and contact information of his therapist just off-campus, and the message, _She's accepting new clients_ and a thumbs-up emoji.

She texted back, **Thank you.**

One from Iris, saying _Welcome baaaaaaaaaaack party tomorrow come over & get pretty be4?_

She answered, **OK, 8?** and got an answer almost right away.

_8 perf cant wait_

The last one on the screen was from her mom.

_Let me know when you get to school safely._

It was what Felicity called classic Anna, brisk and no-nonsense, all the emotion buried.

Caitlin had done a lot of thinking on her drive back from Cisco's house, two weeks before. She'd thought about Paulina, inviting her to dinner, asking about growing up in D.C. instead of anything about her infamous parents, and how it had felt to drink a quiet cup of coffee with her in the kitchen, very early in the morning while Cisco still slept on the couch in the other room. She'd watched the older woman smile at her son, kissing his forehead before tweaking his big toe through the blanket and saying, "Despiertate, mijo, you're missing your time with your novia," and the way Cisco given her a sweet, sleepy smile as he yawned into his own coffee cup. Paulina had given her a hug and a bottle of water and a paper bag - "for the road" - before kissing Cisco on the top of his head and leaving for work.

"But," Caitlin had said blankly, looking at the bag.

"Let her." Cisco had grinned into his coffee cup.

It had some crackers and an apple and a chocolate bar and a cold burrito wrapped in foil. "It's only six hours!"

"Plenty of time to die of starvation as far as she's concerned," he'd said, and laughed at the expression on her face.

When Caitlin had gotten back to Starling City, she'd asked Felicity if they could call their mother together and say Happy New Year. It had been a tight, awkward conversation, made more awkward by all the times Caitlin had ignored her phone calls over the past year. But she was her mom, she was the parent who'd been there, who'd never denied their existence on national television and that was . . . well, it meant something.

Caitlin still didn't understand her mom or the choices she'd made, but she thought she had a better chance of it than she ever did of understanding her dad.

She let out her breath and sent, **Got to school, no problems on the road.** She hit send and stared at the screen, then started typing again. **Call tomorrow? About noon?**

She sent it and set the phone down. Almost immediately, it buzzed and she grabbed it. But her mother hadn't answered yet. Instead, it was from Cisco.

_U back yet_

She felt the smile spread over her face and the warmth spill through her chest. She wrote back. _I just got in and unpacked_

_Sweeeeeeet_

_@ wrk mtg_

_get out soon tho_

_5 min_

_meet me halfway?_

She smiled. **I'll start walking now**

_< 3 u_

He did that constantly now, sending kisses and flowers and hearts. He was a surprisingly mushy boyfriend. She was getting used to it, especially because he got so happy when she sent something like that in return.

It wasn't easy. She had spent so long not even telling Felicity things like "I love you" or "I'm thinking about you" that she had to consciously remind herself to say things like that to Cisco.

But it was important to both of them, now, to remind each other, to say it.

You matter.

They'd used a lot of texts and a lot of minutes, talking to each other over the past two weeks, sharing the things that they'd kept from each other over the fall semester. Sometimes she would get overwhelmed by the same feeling that had swamped her when they'd been together in his room, a shaky fear of being too open, of being too vulnerable. Sometimes - she could hear it in his voice - he did too. She would hold her phone against her chest and look up at her ceiling and breathe through it, and his voice or his words would be there when she was okay again.

She found one of her gloves in the pocket of her coat and the other one under her desk. When he'd visited her in Starling City last week, Cisco had gotten so tired of waiting for her to find a complete set that he'd said she should just grab two at random.

"But they'll be mismatched," Caitlin had said.

"Cute," he said. "Bold. Funky."

 _"Mismatched,"_ she said sternly, and he'd laughed and kissed her and waited another five minutes until she found the second purple one.

The wind blew chilly between the dorms as she set off toward the library. She glanced over at the student union as her stomach growled. They'd go get dinner, she decided. He'd probably drag her to one of the booths and squish them both in the same side so they could cuddle. He would wave and smile at people and say, "You guys know my girlfriend Caitlin?"

He loved saying it.

After, they'd go back to one of their rooms and -

She bit her lip and grinned into her scarf. Oliver had proven unexpectedly big-brotherish when Cisco had visited, and he'd spent the night on the couch again, meaning they hadn't done anything more than feverish sexting since that day in his bedroom.

Caitlin had been shy about it at first - texting was so permanent; it had been her father's texts to her mother that had broken the scandal - but they were college students, not senators, and they were together, and they were in love, and _oh_ she missed him. So she'd tried it out and found that while dirty pictures were still a bridge too far, sending him a text about how much she wanted to sit on his face was an incredible thrill.

Not quite up to the real thing. She'd get the real thing later. A lot.

And nobody gave a shit. It was true. There were girls with their boyfriends and girlfriends all around her as she walked through campus, holding hands, cuddling, giggling, kissing, whispering. Instead of looking at them and feeling jealous and alone, Caitlin looked at them and thought, _I know just how you feel; I'm one of you now._ She was a normal girl in love, and if any of these other girls knew that she couldn't wait to fuck her boyfriend until neither of them could stand up, they would just laugh and agree, because they knew the feeling.

It made all her secrecy last semester feel even more pointless.

A familiar shape tromped through the snow, shoulders hunched against the wind. She felt her stomach swoop.

 _You have to be kind about this,_ Felicity had warned her. _You have to be decent. Don't ignore him or pretend he doesn't exist if you run into each other. It'll be tempting because it's so damn awkward, but don't._

So when the sidewalk she was taking crossed his, she stopped and waited. He looked up and saw her, and his stride hitched. But he kept walking until they were within five feet of each other before he stopped.

She swallowed hard and said, "Hi, Ronnie."

His voice was low and rough. "Hi. Caitlin. How are you?"

He'd left the coffee shop kind of quickly, after she'd told him there was someone else. He'd bitten his lip and muttered, "Okay, I understand," and then made up an errand that meant he had to go right now. She'd felt too awkward to text him after that.

"Fine," she said now. "How was the rest of your break?"

He shrugged. "All right. I just sort of worked and stuff." He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "How, uh, how was yours?"

"Pretty good."

His eyes lifted. "So. You talked to the guy?"

She nodded and didn't know what to say from there.

"So I guess that went okay."

"Very okay."

He nodded. "I figured. When you didn't text anymore. That's good. I'm happy to hear that."

She bit her lip.

"I really am," he said. "I'm not being snarky. I mean, mostly. I guess I can't deny that I was sort of hoping that I could be a shoulder for you to cry on and - " He made a face and shrugged. "But, you know, I want you to be happy more."

"I do like you," she said. "I did for a long time. You're attractive and you're nice and - " She felt herself blushing. "A good kisser. It's not that I don't like you, it's that I want to be with Cisco more."

"Cisco," he said. "Cisco Ramon? That's the guy?"

"Yes. That's my boyfriend." She felt the little swell of happiness that she always did, saying that.

A few different expressions passed over Ronnie's face before he mustered up a smile and said, "Good. He's a great guy. I really like him."

"Me too."

"Yeah, I guess you do." He ducked his head and kicked at the snow some more. "I asked him, you know," he said. "About you. Like, back before Thanksgiving? If you were dating anyone."

"I was the one who wanted to keep it quiet, for a lot of really stupid reasons," she said. "Don't blame him. He was only doing what I wanted. I'm sorry you got hurt, too." She swallowed, letting it settle. She'd hurt not only Cisco, but this boy, and she didn't even have her love to offer when she asked forgiveness. Just regrets.

He shrugged one shoulder. "Nah, it's - I'll be okay."

She tucked her hands into her elbows and wondered if this was the right time to ask him if he still wanted to be friends. Because it was true. She liked him, and she'd liked his friends, and she would be sorry if he never wanted to talk to her again.

But it wouldn't be such a surprise if he said no.

Maybe she should give it some time. Maybe Iris would be able to tell her what was the right thing to do.

"Caitlin?"

"Yes?"

He hunched his shoulders against the wind. "Was there ever a chance that you and me, you know, that we could've gotten together? Like, last year maybe."

She considered him, thinking of herself before she'd met Cisco, before he'd become her friend and then more. "I don't know," she said. "I really don't."

He nodded, pressing his lips together, accepting that this was the best answer she could give him. She felt a bright spark of gratitude that he wasn't the kind of boy who would call her terrible names and spread rumors just because she'd rejected him. She knew that instinctively.

He let out his breath in a stream of mist that hung in the chilly air. "You goin' to the Kappa party tomorrow?" he asked, his voice now cheerful and social.

"Um, yes. I'll be there."

"Sweet. Cool. I'll see you there, then."

She examined his smile. It was bright and warm, maybe a little too bright, but struggling to be sincere, and she managed to smile back. "All right."

"Okay. I - " He pulled his phone out and checked the time. "Um, I think the bookstore's closing soon and I still have to get, um, a thing. So - "

"Of course. I won't keep you."

"See you, Caitlin."

"See you," she said softly, and let him go.

She kept walking, tugging her coat around her. The wind had kicked up. She squinted up ahead at the bell tower. Somebody was walking around it from the other side, pushing his long hair out of his face. She felt her heart jump. "Cisco!" she called out.

He looked up and beamed at her. "Hey!" He picked up his pace.

"No, wait! Stop. Stay right where you are."

He paused, giving her a look that was quizzical even from this distance. She pointed up, and he craned his neck. She saw the moment he realized he was standing right under the bell tower, because his smile redoubled until it was a wonder it didn't melt the falling snow.

He stayed where he was, letting her come right up to him and put her gloved hands on his face, feeling the way his cheeks rounded under her fingers as he grinned at her. She pressed her lips to that grin, and kissed her boyfriend under the bell tower.

His arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her close so they could kiss and kiss and kiss, until girls started to giggle and someone yelled "Get a room!" and they broke apart, laughing. He pushed her hair behind her ears and looked at her the way she'd never thought anybody would look at her, ever. She wanted to cry and laugh and dance and kiss him again, and chose the last option.

Maybe the whole story about staying together forever was true, or maybe it was just another campus myth. But as she kissed him, Caitlin knew that whatever happened, in this moment she was right where she wanted to be.

FINIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone who read this and cheered me on!


End file.
